Скачать или смотреть Keene Cheung - Impermanence (2025)

An original audiovisual composition by Keene Cheung. Created during CCRMA summer workshop 2025: Real-time Audiovisual Composition with RayTone.

Artist statement:
Impermanence explores the constant human fixation on temporary entities and the subsequent fear of losing them. Life has an expiration date. This unfixed nature provides it with the opportunity to be lost, becoming an eventual inevitability. It is the human fear of having stakes to lose that motivates them to cling to what they have out of fear that it will slip away at a moment’s notice. This piece explores similar abstractions of this interaction, both human and non-human, through elements such as flowers, blood, electricity, and fear.

Flowers, like humans, are living organisms with everything to lose. As the petals of the flower shrivel up, the impermanence of the flower’s beauty begins to show as its life fades. Blood is one of the most visceral embodiments of this relationship to impermanence, as it is the fuel that powers countless living beings with oxygen to survive. It is a seemingly unending stream until the moment the heart stops. It is in that moment that the carrier of the heart ceases to exist consciously and loses the last resource they can. Electricity is impermanent in that it never stands still. Position within space is a temporary arrangement as it constantly darts through the atmosphere. In this piece, it is not its life that the electricity loses but rather its identity as electricity, as frames of randomly colored objects obstruct its view and blur the lines of its existence as electricity within the space of the piece. Yet, fear is also temporary. The end of the piece narrates a conquering of the dark and unknown. The liberation of this fear highlights an ironic twist in which conquering an aversion to the impermanent is solved by negating the significance of a fear, which in itself is impermanent.

The piece takes these various entities and replaces them with newer sonic identities that partially reflect their characters but evolve and deteriorate as each scene continues, reflecting the temporary nature of sound in space as it travels, morphs, and dissipates.