BOTCH is an algorithmic performance that goes in search of the voice and its mutations in contemporary digital culture. An ensemble of vocalists cut, paste, reverse and scramble language into a complex audioscape of intricate patterns, uncanny mimicry, and pulverized speech. More a processing system than a traditional score, BOTCH unfolds differently each night through the creative misfiring of voices at their outer limits.
The audience is seated in an immersive gallery-like environment, up close to the performers whose fragmented speech sounds, hand signals and chalkboard diagrams offer more of an enigmatic puzzle than a conventional storyline. However, even in its abstraction, BOTCH directly engages a contemporary human condition, in which a multitasking state of sending and receiving messages trumps all else.
The score follows a digital logic, consisting of if/then statements and operations common to software programs such as cut/paste, sampling and filters. The algorithms that are performed are ‘coded’ in a programming language I developed called BML (BOTCH Modeling Language), which implements data structures, conditional logic, multi-threading, libraries, encapsulation, inheritance, and even error handling. However, there are no computers here – the performers run the code with their voices, parsing and processing speech sounds in surprising ways.
The libretto, which scrolls on a teleprompter throughout the performance plays back ‘Automatic Process Reports,’ stream-of-consciousness text written collectively by the ensemble over the project’s three year development, documenting a rigorous collision of psyche and machine. As they encounter text that changes each night, the performers process this information through splitsecond decisions and responses, resulting in a dramatic vocal complex of raw phonemes and speech melodies.
For a better sense of what it’s like to see and hear BOTCH, check out this article by Ellen Pearlman for Hyperallergic.
BOTCH is performed by Christina Campanella, Michael Chinworth, John Rose, Saori Tsukada and composer, director and designer Joe Diebes, who mixes sound live on stage throughout the show. It is an ongoing project that has been in development since it began at STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music)in Amsterdam in 2010. It was later developed at HERE Art Center (2011 – 2014) and since then has been presented in various forms at venues such as Experimental Intermedia, The Watermill Center, and various visual art spaces.