Highways Performance Space Presents

Future Travel

David Rosenboom with HEX Trio: Molly Pease, Fahad Siadat & Scott Graff

In our age of technologically induced cognitive somnambulism, the abandonment of conscious awareness to the techno-social networks of the synthetic infosphere, Future Travel is about the poiesis of a positive possible, affirming the power of creative assertion and proactive being, no matter the presence and stresses of global uncertainties.

This performance celebrates the expanded reissue of composer-performer David Rosenboom’s classic 1981 journey in sonic imagery, Future Travel, with new music derived from it and performed in combination with his latest score for creative singers, Is Existence Is. The original narrative of Future Travel imagines a spirit being representing the first awareness of a new form of consciousness to which humans evolved after becoming aware of the unstoppable momentum of the course which they had set and the unlikelihood of their surviving. Collaborating with Rosenboom, a scintillating, electrified HEX Trio unfolds this narrative in a dialogue among three personas of the spirit being, interwoven with a seldom-seen film made to accompany the dialogue in 1981 in collaboration with legendary experimental filmmaker, George Manupelli. Future Travel is also the first major composition created with Touché, a radical approach to an electronic keyboard instrument resulting from a 1979-80 design collaboration of Rosenboom with Donald Buchla. A software-based successor called Touché II is heard in this concert. In combination, Is Existence Is arises from reflections on facts and philosophies of existence: concurrent complexities linking inside with outside; places, locations and times of individual and other; and the resplendent emergence of pure spirit. Text modules, images, and sounds combine and recombine like philosophical DNA, as the HEX Trio navigates many possible pathways through notated materials, while their resplendent voices activate banks of ringing electronic resonators tuned to the work’s unique harmonic architecture.