Performance Fingerprints
Performance Fingerprints is an ongoing collaborative art practice developed with violinist and performer Ioana Petcu-Colan. The work explores drawing as a live, responsive system shaped by sound, gesture, and interaction. Using a custom computational drawing environment, acoustic performance is translated into evolving visual processes—not as representation, but as a record of exchange between performer, system, and context.
Improvisation is a keystone of the project. For the musicians, this involves working with timing, texture, and extended techniques in response to the system’s behaviour; for me, it means improvising visuals in real time using MarkSynth as an instrument rather than a fixed tool. Sound, drawing, and computation operate as equal agents in a shared improvisational field, where decisions are made moment-to-moment and outcomes remain open and contingent.
Developed through live working sessions across Belfast and the Cork School of Music, Performance Fingerprints functions as both practice and inquiry—testing how systems mediate collaboration, how notation can emerge through action, and how authorship is distributed in live work. A longer-term aim is the creation of physical “fingerprints” as material residues of performance; while this remains a largely latent characteristic of the work at present, early physical outcomes function as proofs of concept for how live, improvised events might later be translated into durable artefacts.
We are performing live at The MAC in Belfast in March, Cork's Midsummer Festival in June, and have plans to tour more widely.
> Technical details
the code is C++ and GLSL on OpenFrameworks; composite images created at 50+ megapixels for post-event creation of physical artefacts, reduced to fit projection for live viewing; physical artefacts based on silver-leaf gilded photographic prints mounted on wooden boards as triptychs 1200mm x 600mm, or small robot-etched drypoint prints also gilded with silver-leaf.