This event is free and unticketed
Mac Waters
Performance
2024 New Music Festival

Mac Waters

April 19, 2024

This event occurred as part of the 23/24 Music Department season. This is an archived view.

An audiovisual installation and performance project that mutates the highly personalized content-sharing algorithm on TikTok into a motion-activated synthesizer.

New Music Festival

The project investigates embodiments of digitally-transmitted auditory and visual memetics, particularly in the wake of a 2021 study that exposed a prevalence of movement disorders among young teenagers—a mass sociogenic illness of "TikTok tics." Through the improvisatory distortion of a user's TikTok "For You Page" in real time, TikTokBox is a duet between a user and their feed, the individual and the collective, the conscious and the subconscious.
 
The performance will be followed by an informal discussion and Q&A.
 
The development of TikTokBox was generously supported by a 2022 Arts Integration Grant from the Hopkins Center of the Arts.

Mac Waters (they/he) is a dynamic multimedia composer and improviser working and performing across a spectrum of interdisciplinary contexts. Mac's research investigates the interplay between collective memory and sonic nostalgia, particularly in relation to virtual/extended realities, internet (sub)cultures, queerness and digital medievalism. His diverse creative practice spans composing chamber music for leading contemporary ensembles, composing electroacoustic music for film and dance, performing as a vocalist and violist in interdisciplinary and multimedia performances, designing interactive Virtual & Extended Reality experiences, and recording and producing original song. Their works have been performed by Fonema Consort (Chicago), Wet Ink (New York City), Conrad Tao (New York City), Mivos Quartet (NYC), Ostravska Banda (Ostrava, Czech Republic) and Ars Futura (Cleveland). Mac's extensive capacity as a violist-improviser has been featured internationally in ensembles such as the Cherry-Ah-Cole Ensemble (Hanover, New Hampshire), the Venice Exploratory Ensemble (Venice, Italy), the International Contemporary Ensemble's Ensemble Evolution (New York City) and Anthony Braxton's Creative Orchestra (Darmstadt, Germany). As a XR for the Humanities Fellow with the Dartmouth College Data Experiences Visualization (DEV) Studio, he is developing a 3D-audio studio for interdisciplinary research and performance. 
 
Among numerous awards and prizes, Mac is the recipient of the Columbia University Charles S. Miller Composition Prize (2022) and the Hopkins Center for the Arts Arts Integration Grant (2023). Mac holds a BA in Music from Columbia University with a special concentration in Medieval & Renaissance Studies, and he is currently in pursuit of a MFA in Sonic Practice studying with Ash Fure, César Alvarez and Taylor Ho Bynum.

New Music 2024
New Music Festival

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