MIRЯOR VIEW (2020)
interactive web-based composition, 15-20 minutes
What is MIRЯOR VIEW?
MIRЯOR VIEW is an interactive web-based composition inspired by social media and its influences on society and individuals’ thoughts and behavioural patterns.
MIRЯOR VIEW is a (self-)reflective intersection between, by, and for the user and artist. Point of venture is the documentation of the artist’s practice as a creative saxophonist and the artist’s musical and personal experiences in the previous two years (2018–2020).
MIRЯOR VIEW is a brief moment away from passive watching.
Discover how your actions influence your personal experience.
What will your decisions sound like?
With MIRЯOR VIEW I wanted to explore alternative possibilities for showing one’s work in a period of social distancing and massive online concert viewing. This interactive web-based composition acts as an answer to the more passive YouTube live streams that were omnipresent at the time.
Many thanks to Alexander Schubert for the many inspiring composition lessons, Rama Gottfried for assistance with the coding, and Georg Hajdu for putting the piece on the server of Quintet.net.
MIRЯOR VIEW was also part of the WDT 1:3 virtual exhibition in February 2021.
I coded MIRЯOR VIEW during the first months of the pandemic in 2020 as my final project for my master’s degree in Contemporary Performance and Composition (CoPeCo). The piece brings together my practices as a saxophonist, improvisor, composer, and coder. It is the creative result of research conducted on audience participation and the influence of social media on society. It is also the central work of my master’s thesis, called Social Media Composing: Using Social Media Phenomena as a Base for Musical Creation.
I wanted to work with the fear of missing out (FOMO), an older psychological principle that has become more known since the rise of social media. I decided to combine this phenomenon with the concept of EdgeRank (Facebook’s former algorithm that selected the content on the user’s feed), and I shaped the interface in the form of a (self-help) questionnaire. Both social media and questionnaires work by narrowing down and profiling people based on their choices. They can both act as mirrors for oneself to position themselves in the world.
I then constructed a musical labyrinth with a myriad of pathways that relied on the user’s choices. We constantly share our opinions on platforms, and it changes what we are shown, whether we ‘like’ it or not. I made this mechanism central to the work. Depending on the answers, certain audio associated with the choice is played back. What starts with easy questions soon becomes more personal. As the users continue clicking, they are being profiled, and certain possible content is altered or even filtered out as a result, leading to a wide variety of sonic outcomes in the same work.
