Mapping codependency: Intermedial causality in real-time audiovisual performance

Abstract

This paper examines how multimodal mapping can function as a collaborative methodology in real-time audiovisual performance. It explores how functional codependency and real-time risk create bonds between artists, becoming fundamental narrative and dramaturgical vectors, and revealing the aesthetic influence of the technological systems shaping contemporary practice. Building on technical research into connectivity and latency, we examine the compositional affordances of those systems and how they shape the experience of performers and audiences. We treat telematic performance as an enabling condition for intermediality and develop our argument through two real-time performances built on a recursive mapping process. The first focused on capturing and transforming gestural data from a violin bow into a robotic system for painting calligraphy within a general constraint of telematic data transfer; the second constructed a longer chain of causality between kinetic sculpture, machine vision, generative music and video mapping. We detail a four-stage multimodal mapping methodology and reflect on how performers and audiences perceive chains of dependency in real-time systems, on the broader apophenic tendency to interpret causation and intention in complex systems, and on what this implies for a reconsideration of post-media aesthetics.