Chaos Laboratory

During the pandemic I stayed home all day and felt like a mad scientist locked in a laboratory, making works and running experiments. The works were a kind of daily diary: whatever I thought, saw or felt, in a bad mood or a good one, all of it went into the pieces. So the premise of Chaos Laboratory is a mad scientist who collects forbidden emotions and dangerous ideas around the city, carries them back to a basement, and breeds strange creatures and experiments on the edge; it was much like my own wish to push past my limits.

It was my first immersive space. Most performance-driven shows run on tools built for performance; I insisted on the web, because most of what I make lives there and I wanted anyone to be able to run it on their own device. p5.js was meant to be an artist’s toy, and here I made it a live-performance instrument, wiring twenty to thirty works into a keyboard, a Launchpad and Ableton Live so that the beat drove the visuals on five walls at once. I chose works by two measures only: those that resonate at a glance, like Soul Sea, where you walk in and know it is the sea; and those pure and forceful enough to join into a whole room, like Rollercoaster winding through the space.