Performance Fingerprints marks the beginning of an ongoing collaborative project developed with violinist and performer Ioana Petcu-Colan. The project explores drawing as a responsive system shaped by live sound and performance, investigating how acoustic and performative gestures can be translated into visual form through computational processes.

At the centre of the work is a custom-built drawing system that responds in real time to sound. Rather than treating audio as a simple control signal, the system is designed to register nuance—changes in intensity, articulation, rhythm, and texture—allowing visual traces to emerge through interaction and improvisation. Each session produces a distinct visual outcome, shaped jointly by the performer’s decisions and the behaviour of the system itself.

This initial phase of the project focused on developing a shared working language between sound and drawing. Working closely with Petcu-Colan, live sessions functioned as experiments, testing how different musical approaches influenced the visual output, and how the constraints of the drawing system in turn fed back into performance choices. The resulting drawings can be understood as traces of these exchanges: not representations of sound, but records of interaction over time.

Development of the project to date has taken place across Belfast and the Cork School of Music, reflecting a distributed working process that extends beyond the artist’s studio base and is shaped by the specific contexts in which rehearsals and experiments occur.

As a starting point, Performance Fingerprints opens up a broader line of inquiry into collaboration, notation, and the role of systems in live artistic practice. Future iterations will continue to develop the relationship between sound, computation, and drawing across different contexts, performers, and performance settings.

The video below documents one of these early sessions, showing the drawing system and performance unfolding together in real time.

Sequence (with close-ups) from Movement 1: Bubbling Up

Sequence (with close-ups) from Movement 2: Stream Grows and Gathers

Sequence (with close-ups) from Movement 3: The River Expands

Sequence (with close-ups) from Movement 4: The River Nurtures Life

Sequence (with close-ups) from Movement 5: Call of the Sea

The work is supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.