Out at Sea / Striptease (Derklöwnschpankeneffekt)

Sound and media design for Derklöwnschpankeneffekt — a double bill of Sławomir Mrożek’s absurdist one-acts Out at Sea and Striptease, produced by Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern at Manbites Dog Theater in Durham, NC. Directed by Michael O’Foghludha, with performances by Jeffrey Detwiler, Carl Martin, and Jay O’Berski.

Wireless Sonification of Motion

This production is where my practice of wirelessly sonifying physical gesture began. The set designers built a giant hand as a central prop for Striptease. I installed a battery-powered Arduino with an XBee radio module and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) inside the hand, streaming real-time position and orientation data over a wireless serial link to a Max/MSP patch running on the sound design computer. The hand’s movements — tilting, rotating, being carried across the stage — generated and shaped sound in real time.

This was the first time I embedded wireless sensors in a theatrical prop and used the resulting motion data to drive live audio synthesis. The technical approach — battery-powered microcontroller, wireless radio, IMU, Max/MSP receiver — became the foundation for the systems I would build for synthball (2017), where the same architecture was miniaturized into a handheld wireless controller for participatory performance, and later for Soundz at the Back of My Head (2020) and Enacting the Circle (2022/2026), where gesture tracking and haptic feedback techniques extended the same principle into dance and spatial audio contexts.