Icumen booklet and digital album

200 page soft-back book (edition of 40)
USB flash drive
- Live audio and video recording of a performance of Icumen at Rame Projects (Cornwall)

Icumen consists of a series of compositions using sounds sourced from found videos of the Obby Oss, a Cornish May Day celebration. The project explores childhood memories of being caught within the turmoil of this shared celebration by disassembling and manipulating the found sounds into new compositions.

In 2020­/2021 the project evolved as a series of live improvised sound performances working with the original compositions and audio sources. As part of this development the project also introduced a visual component. Working with dancer Katherine Hall to explore movements and gestures associated with the Obby Oss, as well as responding to ideas around cyclical repetition, a library of movements were recorded using motion capture technologies. In collaboration with developer and artist Gabriel Stones, the library of human movements was then translated into a digital cloth­-like object and handed over to a simple AI within a game engine. The subsequent interpretation of movements by the AI is generated in real­time, creating a live performance that responds directly to the audio compositions.

This booklet contains 200 stills from a performance of Icumen recorded at Rame Projects (Cornwall) in 2021. The selected stills capture a fraction of the possible combinations generated by the interaction between the AI and the movements originally performed by Katherine Hall.

Icumen is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England

[This is a limited run of 30 with an additional 10 copies offered to collaborators and supporters of the project. Each copy is numbered and dated and sold at cost]

Includes unlimited streaming of Icumen via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.