Performance Fingerprints — heading to The MAC, Belfast

For the last few months I’ve been working on turning Performance Fingerprints into something we can perform in public: a live drawing piece with improvising musicians. We premiere it at The MAC, Belfast on 13 March 2026.

The drawing comes from MarkSynth, an instrument I’ve built that listens to the musicians and watches them through a camera. It picks up breath, bow pressure, attack, sustained notes and how people move around the space, and turns them into a drawing that builds up, clears and re-forms as the music goes on.

The music is acoustic and improvised, and nothing is pre-programmed. The players respond to the room, to each other and to how the set is going. I want the drawing to respond just as quickly, so that it’s something we play together.

In rehearsal I’ve been working on two controls that make the system usable live. Agency is a sliding scale that shifts control between the performers, through sound and the camera, and me, through the instrument’s settings. It lets the drawing lead sometimes and follow at other times. Intent lets me steer the general feel of the drawing (still, sparse, flowing or turbulent) without micromanaging the details.

Most of the run-up has gone into making the system less fragile and building a set of visual “registers” I can rely on, so it can hold its own as an instrument alongside violin, flute, percussion and trombone.

At The MAC the focus is on the live show. I’ve also built the system so that the drawing from a performance can be printed afterwards and painted into.

Some rehearsal stills:

Rehearsal footage

The first update has more on how the project started.