I went to the n-Topia show and it was not at all what I was expecting. It reminded me a lot of avant garde art or something out of David Lynch's repertoire. The graphics were disorienting and the audio was ominous, but the combined was mesmerizing and filled me with a weird existential dread. The sound design on the project did such a good job at making me feel unsettled, and what blew me away was the fact that all the layered sounds came from an acoustic guitar. The musician at the end of the piece showed us some of the ways she creates new sound affects on her guitar with things like hammers and rubber balls, it was simple and ingenuitive. The way the music and the imagery flowed together made it feel that we, the viewers, were traveling , which in an indirect way created a narrative. To me, it felt like we were traveling underwater. The way the particles moved looked like waves and the music had deep creaks and groans that felt like the bottom of the ocean could make them. It wasn't until after the show that I found out that particles are based on arial images of Denver. The project manager briefly went over the technology behind the imagery and she made it sound like an interesting way to manipulate and portray different data. It is definitely something I would like to look into more if I could remember the name.
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