Instructions for Not Disappearing

Instructions for Not Disappearing is a solo work for voice, live electronics, live video and an instrument I built: a tray of water. Ebru is the Turkish art of marbling — pigment floated on a thickened surface and drawn into figures that exist only while the water holds them. I have rebuilt it as a live audiovisual instrument. The tray is read by contact microphones and re-excited from beneath by transducers, so the water is simultaneously sensor, resonator and actuator: a small audible ecosystem I perturb rather than command. A camera above the surface projects the image; granular, spectral and convolution processing folds my voice into the water until the boundary between the two stops being audible. Every mark is permanent — pigment on water cannot be corrected — so the piece is composed of accidents I have to live inside.

The fifteen minutes follow an alchemical arc in five sections — Prima Materia · Dissolution · Fermentation · Calcination · Gold — in which the harmonic field is progressively stripped until only a single pitch remains. Modal ambiguity (E, G, B, C♯, D) collapses into pure E: not major, not minor, not resolved, not triumphant. Just presence. The tray is the primary electronic sound source throughout; the voice emerges from its world, not the other way around. Opening pitch G3, the shadow; final pitch E6, the singularity — low register to high, ambiguity to presence. The piece ends not in triumph but in declaration: I am not finished. And then one more gesture, which is the title made literal: a sheet of paper is laid on the water and lifted, and the floating image — which would otherwise dissolve — is saved.

The work takes its title seriously. It is about what it costs to remain legible: a body, a language and a craft each held at the edge of dissolution. The voice is hidden, half-spoken, absorbed, and finally exposed. The image blooms and disperses. Nothing is undone. It is the first finished work of Fluid Narratives, my doctoral research at UC Berkeley (CNMAT / BCNM) and HEAR Strasbourg, and was premiered at CCRMA, Stanford, on 10 April 2026 as part of MediaFlock, with a second performance at ZKM Karlsruhe on 19 June 2026.