Creative Work

Extended portfolio here.

Personal website here.

RMxPLOrk (2024, pending release)

Audiovisual composition by Roscoe Mitchell, Christopher Douthitt, and the Princeton Laptop Orchestra.

Percussion, saxophone, electronics, and video.

Link to video

“RMxPLOrk” (working title) is a collaborative audiovisual piece between Roscoe Mitchell, myself, and the Princeton Laptop Orchestra. The project is in its post-production phase and we are making release plans.

“RMxPLOrk” showcases two facets of my artistic personality: one, my enthusiasm for big, collaborative projects that blur boundaries between traditional musical roles and genres (which I believe is a through line in my work), and two, my enthusiasm for making multimedia art (which is a relatively new direction for me). In helping to bring this piece to life, I wore multiple hats: producer, creative director, video artist, audio engineer, and co-composer.

Because of the way the piece was composed, there is no score or similar documentary material. Instead, I’ll provide narrative context for the piece here.

The piece was created during lockdown. I was directing the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) for the 2020-21 season. I secured funding to commission Mitchell to make a collaborative piece, and I designed the following structure for our creative partnership. First, Mitchell recorded percussion tracks and sent the results to PLOrk. Second, six members of PLOrk recorded electronic duets with Mitchell’s percussion. They sent the results to me. Third, I treated the duets as raw material to shape into a seven-part, percussion-meets-PLOrk texture. I sent the results to Mitchell. Fourth, Mitchell recorded saxophone parts over this composite texture. He sent the results to me. Fifth, I sculpted the resulting percussion-meets-PLOrk-meets-saxophone texture into a finished mix; the result was a 31-minute audio composition.

To give visuals to the audio, I worked closely with the video artist Wendy Nelson. Nelson created a makeshift film set consisting of Mitchell’s paintings. She filmed all of Mitchell’s audio takes in front of this set and sent me the results, along with several high-resolution still images of Mitchell’s art. Using a combination of Max, Jitter, and the Adobe creative suite, I turned the still images into six audio-reactive videos, with each video reacting to one of the PLOrk member’s electronic parts. I then used the audio-reactive videos to frame the footage of Mitchell playing his acoustic instruments. The result is a visual representation of the asynchronous, polyphonic improvisation that comprises the piece.