Visual Music Residency

I’ve just come back from the Visual Music residency, part of the wider Dyski programme in Cornwall, hosted by writer and musician Dion Star and led by artists and performers Lea Fabrikant and Tarik Barri. It was chaotically exciting: one of those weeks where ideas, tools, conversations, and possibilities kept colliding in the best way.

I arrived a day early because I had a full day’s drive to get there, and that gave me a little time to settle in by walking and sketching before everyone else arrived. The woods, the shoreline, and the general sense of being properly away from routine all became part of the week as much as the studio sessions did.

The residency was focussed on Ableton Live and VideoSync, Tarik’s software for treating video musically inside Ableton. The first couple of days opened up ways of thinking about video not as something fixed to be played back, but as material that can be phrased, timed, warped, and performed. What stayed with me most was the sense that this wasn’t only about software, but about rhythm, responsiveness, and how moving image can become part of performance rather than a layer added on top.

I went there with Performance Fingerprints very much in mind. I took MarkSynth, my audio-video responsive visual synthesiser, with one main goal: to connect the generated visuals more directly to events in the performance that the system is responding to. But being in a room with artists and musicians working across performance, moving image, sound, and live systems quickly widened that question for me. The residency gave me not just new tools, but an expanded appreciation of the world of music making and performance that this work sits within.

By the final part of the week, I had made a Syphon integration to publish buffers from MarkSynth so that it could connect to other live video tools, including VideoSync, Resolume, and any other Syphon-compatible software. That felt like a real step forward. A longer-term direction for me now is to integrate MarkSynth more deeply with Ableton itself, which could open up a lot of new performance possibilities for where Performance Fingerprints goes next.

I also made asciiVideo for one of Dion’s forthcoming projects, which came directly out of the shared spirit of making and exchange across the week. Alongside the technical discoveries, I’ve come away with new friendships, vivid memories of the work everyone shared, and a sense of how generous and open this particular community can be.

Some of my strongest memories are of the whole shape of the week: the projects people made and showed, the conversations about process and practice, the walks through the bluebell woods and down to the water, the meals together, and one evening in particular when we projected visuals onto the trees around the house.

I’m still not entirely sure where this leaves the longer arc of Performance Fingerprints, and I’m happy not to force that answer too quickly. What I do know is that the residency has opened up a lot of new routes forward, technically, performatively, and collaboratively, and that feels like a very good place to be.