Diffraction: a ballet for light is a collaborative audiovisual work in four movements.

Diffraction: A ballet for light (Four movements)

Ryan Devens - music, John Thompson - visuals *

In the spring of 2021, we were still in pandemic mode although vaccines were rolling out. During that time, I worked with Ryan Devens on the creation of Diffration: a ballet for light. Ryan creates the audio and I create the video for this work.

Ryan was in the process of finalizing his Pulsar plugin, which is featured throughout Diffraction. The plugin implmenents Pulsar Synthesis (with some unique twists). In this piece, Ryan uses it to good effect, and in a way that is uniquely his own. The pulsar synthesis was combined his performance on analog synthesizers, including a vintage 1982 Moog Prodigy.

The visual side of things works in three dimensional space, with the rendering of that space fed back into the three dimensional space on a video plane … which is rendered and fed back etc. The movement of the objects in the three dimensional space is linked to sin and cos curves along with perlin noise. Audio sources are occastionally parametrically tied to the visual system. This is particularly evident in the audio taken from Ryan’s Pulsar plugin. I use some real-tie controls of the system to perform the visuals in tandem with Ryan.

In an interesting aside, Ryan and I worked with intention regarding the process for making this work. This intention focused on setting up a situation in which we made sure to divide the technical concerns away from the concerns of performance and improvisation.