Zak Norman of Black Box Echo came to me with an interesting challenge…
He had built a show using the most impressive and cumbersome Quartz Composer patch I have ever seen and wanted me to understand it enough to be his understudy should the need ever arise.

We spent a couple of days together and I wrote an instruction manual which would hopefully be enough to let me get the show up and running. The system used structured midi data sent to QC from Ableton live which was directly synced to Tom’s laptop on stage. The twisted logic that Zak implemented ensured that every show would be individual. Before each and every performance he would input a set of localised data, such as weather conditions and city population, from these data points the programme would make choices such as allocations of colour or distortion etc.
Zak had employed the talents of the best QC programmers in the game, Anton Marini and George Toledo to create some of the generative compositions within his megastructure and it was a pleasure to see how it all combined to produce some impressive results.
Thankfully I never needed to be understudy but I did get to do one show alongside Zak at Lovebox and the instructions worked about 90% of the way. It was also nice to put a face to the name Pesh who was projectionist for this show.