Come fly under with us
Come dive into the salt sun
Become the glittering wings
Beyond the clouds
Beneath the moving sand
Be the ripples of Bouladjel
Be the tides of infinite passage…
by David Gumbs
This new work is an invitation to wonder : what if our ancestors talked to us through dances of light and shadows ? What if their voices have transcend the middle passage revealing untold stories ?
“Listen more often to Things than to Beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind,
To the bush that is sobbing :
It is the breath of ancestors.”
Those who are dead are not ever gone;
They are in the darkness that grows lighter
And in the darkness that grows darker.
The dead are not down in the earth;
They are in the trembling of the trees
In the groaning of the woods,
In the water that runs,
In the water that sleeps,
They are in the hut, they are in the crowd:
The dead are not dead.
…
by Birago Diop
This poem captures the essence of the new directions in David’s work. One where shadows are not shadows. And light are endless whispers, that emerges as a living archive, where the breath of nature shapes both image and sound..
/// Creative process ///
At the core of the piece lies an innovative, real-time generative system. Over several months of research, artist David Gumbs developed a custom workflow bridging multiple software environments, data layers, and algorithmic processes. As a visual artist with no musical background, he embraced the technical challenge of allowing the rhythms of the world to become self-composing.
A bespoke tracking algorithm detects the flight of butterflies and birds, as well as wave crashes and recedes. Each of these natural movements triggers a musical note, generating a dynamic soundscape that responds live to the visual elements. The soundtrack is not pre-recorded, it unfolds in real time, shaped entirely by the movement of the living world captured in the video.
Interwoven with this generative audio are fragments of Caribbean rhythmic traditions, such as the reinterpretations of Bouladjel (Guadeloupe), transformed through algorithmic processes. Rather than being sampled or looped, these rhythms are reimagined as evolving sonic textures, creating a dialogue between ancestral knowledge and endangered ecologies.
Be the Tides of Infinite Passage is not just a video, but an immersive and living composition, an intricate, poetic system where nature, memory, and code converse in constant motion.