“Nocturnal”
by Ben Guerrette, LUX | LUMN and Timothy ‘ill poetic’ Gmeiner,
This past winter, I had the opportunity to contribute to "City Lights: An Immersive Journey Through Sound & Light" , an audiovisual series of installations at San Diego's Quartyard, organized by my friend and With Flying Colors creative collaborator Ben Guerrette and featuring a host of visual artists.
One of the standout pieces from this 6-week installation was "Nocturnal", a collaborative project between Ben (creative direction, system design, lighting design and co-musical production), Brian "LUX | LUMN" Goodwin (art direction & visuals) and myself (co-musical production) that explores the visual evolution of light within a city from sunset to sunrise, scored by a collage of 80s and 90s electronic dance tracks remixed and reimagined. For me, this piece captured the connective magic of music in your 20s: friends and moments loved, lived and lost, feeling like time was infinite until it wasn't.
My job was to thread together, and in some cases completely rebuild, classic 80s/90s Trance, Jungle, DnB, Chicago House and Detroit Techno songs (shouts to Blacktronika and King Britt for the house and techno inspiration) alongside original production, scoring and remixes from both myself and Ben - check the Sade "No Ordinary Love" tag-team hip-hop/drum-n-bass remix from Ben & I. Brian then created a visual projection mapped to the music and Ben choreographed the surrounding lights.
The resulting installation was then experienced through 'silent disco' style headphones which were synced up, allowing for groups of people to watch and listen together.
This experience ran for roughly six weeks, and I had the opportunity to pop in a few times to watch people of all ages and backgrounds experience this installation. Some people danced, some laughed, some cried. It was incredible to be a part of something so unique that could affect a wide range of people so meaningfully.
These experiences never quite lend themselves to the tiny panels of a social media feed, but I'm truly proud of this one and I hope you enjoy it.
Shouts to Ableton, Touch Designer, and Unreal Engine for providing the tools to make this possible.
Watch the full City Lights "Nocturnal" audiovisual installation on YouTube via the link in bio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al4yZHEoXc4
Full list of remixes and reinterpolated songs:
TBD
About: Inspired by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s childhood classic “The Little Prince”, "Dreams Dyed Blue" is an immersive audiovisual hip-hop performance that explores the beauty, fear, adventure, sadness and loneliness of self-discovery, as told through the story of a small child’s journey through the stars. Through a synesthetic relationship of spoken-word lyricism, electroacoustic musicianship and dynamic projected visuals, this introspective performance reconciles the inner-workings of one’s unique imagination and the remembrance of loved ones lost to the universe around us.
Performance: This performance debuted on April 17, 2025 at UC-San Diego’s Experimental Theater. It was performed using a 32-channel soundsystem and full back wall projection screen. Real-time audio from vocal, acoustic and electronic elements were used to generate spatial and visual components of the performance. Conversely, visual projections informed performative aspects of the electronic music elements. With the goal of creating a truly dynamic and immersive experience, all multimodal aspects of this performance directly influenced the others in real-time.
Personnel: Timothy “ill poetic” Gmeiner - vocals, electronics // Ben Guerrette - visual director, visual designer // David Aguila - trumpet, modular synthesizer // Natalia Merlano-Gomez - vocals and vocal effects // Anita Chandavarkar - flute // Mingyong Cheng - visual designer // Lux | Lumn - visual designer // written & directed by Timothy “ill poetic” Gmeiner
Technical Specs: This performance is built around OSC dialog across two separate networks communicating from a single laptop running Ableton Live and various MIDI controllers to 1) a 32-channel Meyer Sound System via the Meyer SpaceMapGo application, and 2) two laptops running two instances of TouchDesigner. Visuals and spatial coordinates are triggered in real-time based on various electronic synthesis and resonance properties as well as acoustic properties based on live musician improvisation.
Examples of two pieces performed, including the live capture of the musicians, can be viewed below
With Flying Colors ft. Mingyong Cheng, David Aguila & Natalia Gomez "Do You Smile In Your Dreams?"
"Do You Smile In Your Dreams?" is a spatialized live improvised audiovisual performance that journeys through a mind with dementia to paint the walls with sound: music and words that poke through the fog and isolation to invite brief moments of colorful memory and human connection. In this story, indistinguishable murmurs from strangers in a hospital room heard by the patient are interrupted by a loved one's voice which cuts through the fog and confusion. This voice, presented in the piece as a Cherokee recitation of “The Lord’s Prayer”, provides the basic for recollection, represented by colorful reactivity in the patient's 3D MRI brain scan every time it’s heard. These brief moments of connection end with the patient's successful retrieval of a series of meaningful memories. Visuals by Mingyong Cheng.
With Flying Colors ft. Anita Chandavarkar "Tree Tones"
“Tree Tones (Variation I)” uses recursive plant-based algorithms (fractals and l-systems), synthetic textures and sound manipulation alongside live electroacoustic improvisation and visual projection to explore human-nature-technology relationships through a dynamic and iterative multimedia performance
In this electroacoustic piece, resonators are randomly generated across 32 channels of spatial audio and simultaneously mapped to visual raindrops of the same randomized coordinates. As the resonating notes increase decay, they become more melodic, allowing for variations in pitch and noise harmonics. These musical qualities are in dialog with various parameters of a concentric circle to alters it's shape piece by piece pending note decay, noise filtering and melodic movements. This improvisation is joined by floutist Anita Chandavarkar on bansuri, who dialogs directly with the electronic resonators. Essentially, the flute, electronics and visual elements are all informing each other in real-time. Visuals by Ben Guerrette.
Contact: Timothy Gmeiner: tgmeiner@ucsd.edu | Ben Guerrette: ben.guerrette@gmail.com