Video / multimedia / video scores
Multimedia
Video and multimedia works by Daniel Portelli, including instrumental performance, video art, video scores, ecological media, sound art, and installation works.
Selected video works and documentation
Supralateral
A multimedia work for bayan accordion, microtonal electric guitar, baritone saxophone, lo-fi electronics, starling bird whistle and video, shaped by atmospheric halos, geometric rings, pillars and arcs.
Supralateral began from an interest in the molecular scatterings of light found in halos in the atmosphere. Geometric rings, pillars and arcs became ways of thinking about points and lattice in the dimensions of sound. The work uses geometric microtonality, timbral and spectral divergence, warped images of halos, surrealist treatment, dense low sonorities and an overarching holistic glow.
Memory Tape [video-score]
A video-score environment for trombone and cello, drawing on empty reel-to-reel tape, soft instrumental textures, memory, crackle, microtonal fluctuation and wavering time.
Memory Tape explores a lexicon of soft textured instrumental sounds that take their cue from the whispers of an empty rotating reel-to-reel tape machine. The piece works with microscopic grains of instrumental friction, tape crackle, spatial dislocation and wavering divisions of time. A sustained pitch becomes a conceptual ground, revealing microtonal fluctuations, timbral detail and dense multiphonic transformations.
Dream Recorder for Paetzold
A dream-derived work for contrabass recorder, mirrors and non-linear notation, concerned with altered states and impossible listening spaces.
Dream Recorder explores dreams and consciousness research in a performance context. The score was designed to be performed in both dream and wakeful states. In the waking-life adaptation, mirrors fragment perception and echo the unstable nature of dreams, while the non-linear clock-like notation asks how music, agency and listening might operate in altered states.
What the River Doesn’t Say About Itself
An art music video essay made in mangroves and river environments, where boats, performers, water and ecological setting form a distributed performance system.
The river becomes a stage, but also a living system that listens back through wind, water, mangroves and performer. In the mangroves, music becomes a way of communing with the river. The performers are not simply placed in the environment; they are composed by it.
Tendril Helices
A work shaped by plant tendrils, spiralling line formations, musical growth patterns, coiling motion and environmental responsiveness.
The spiralling growth patterns of plant tendrils are reframed as musical lines. The piece draws on the way young plants explore space through slow circular motion, translating growth, coiling and environmental responsiveness into musical behaviour.
Music in Impossible Spaces
A project concerned with music on small boats, hypnagogic dream states, mind wandering and unstable performance spaces.
Music in impossible spaces is music performed in a dream. A dream can become a concert hall when listening enters a space that waking perception cannot hold. The body, the boat and the dream are all moving spaces of otherness, asking how listening changes when performance occurs in unstable, drifting or imagined spaces.
Water Pail
A haptic sound installation and performance for cooking oil drums, transducers, water, small percussion and resonant objects.
Water Pail is written for 8 large cooking oil drums, 8 transducers, 4 audio playback devices with amplifiers, exposed speaker, finger cymbals, metal güiro, water, brushes, soft and rubber mallets. It can be realised as a performance or as part of a sound art installation, connecting water, carrying, resonant material, percussion and cultural memory.
Animal
A work for violin, cello, percussion, keyboard and choir with animated video score, vocalising the implied sounds of silent video material.
Animal draws on text from the National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention 2014 and recollections of children held in detention. The text is broken up and scattered into a colourful game-like animated video score. Performers vocalise the implied sounds in the silent videos, while whispered words hover above the audience like a throng of tiny lost souls.
Whale Fall
A large ensemble, electronics, video and spoken-word work using dream recall recordings and the ecological image of a whale fall.
Whale Fall is for flute, violin, cello, e-bass, piano, percussion, electronics, video and spoken word using dream recall recordings. The title suggests a slow ecological process in which a body becomes environment, with instrumental, electronic and spoken materials accumulating, decomposing and forming a submerged sonic habitat.
Memory Tape (2015) Daniel Portelli
Performance documentation connected to the Memory Tape video-score project, foregrounding instrumental action, projected image and perceptual ambiguity.
This documentation shows the performance situation of Memory Tape, where instrumental action is drawn into relation with projected image, memory, tape-machine residue and unstable temporal divisions. The visual field is not decorative but part of the score environment that shapes the performers’ sonic decisions.
Mapping Australia / Cartografie in Australië
A work for piano and electronics with video score, developed around mapped forms, visual correlation and spatial-material translation.
Mapping Australia relates cartographic image, piano, electronics and video-score practice. It translates mapped forms and spatial-material ideas into musical behaviour, linking visual movement, instrumental action and the politics of how place is represented, traced and reimagined.
Serpentine
A multimedia work for erhu, percussion, video and spoken poetry, centred on winding shapes, curved movement and serpentine lines.
Serpentine brings erhu, percussion, video and spoken poetry into a shared field of curved movement. Winding forms and serpentine lines become a way of shaping visual-musical motion, where gesture, image and sound coil around one another rather than moving in a single straight direction.
Hyperbodies
A robotic piano work exploring multi-tempi, tempo proportion, mechanical agency, machine precision and superhuman virtuosity.
Hyperbodies was written for robotic piano and takes its cues from Conlon Nancarrow’s multi-tempi, tempo proportion sound-mass canons. A short rhythmic sequence loops across all 88 keys, with each key moving at a different speed. The result shifts between stream formations, swarming pulsation, suspended stasis, mechanical gesture and a superhuman virtuosity beyond ordinary human performability.
A Sense of Space
A work for flute, nylon guitar and soprano with percussion, concerned with grains, swarms, fragile surface noise and spatial perception.
A Sense of Space works with the perception of space through sound: grains, swarms, fragile surface noise and instrumental texture become ways of hearing distance, proximity and material presence. The ensemble is treated as a spatial field rather than only a set of instrumental lines.
Supralateral [video-score]
A video-score version connected to Supralateral, showing the visual-notational layer that informs performer coordination and multimedia perception.
The video-score layer of Supralateral extends the halo-like visual field into notation. Image, sound and performer action remain interdependent: the score becomes a visual field of uncertainty where signs, instrumental gesture and sonic meaning continue to shift around one another.
Antibiosis
An earlier chamber ensemble and recorded-media work concerned with flux, environmental imagery and audiovisual form.
Antibiosis sits within an earlier period of work concerned with flux, environmental imagery and audiovisual structure. Chamber ensemble, samples and video are used to form a field of unstable relations, where sound characteristics move between points of difference and visual form becomes part of the musical thinking.
Watershed
An audiovisual work connected to water, flow, environmental transformation and early flux-form thinking.
Watershed belongs to the broader development of flux-form thinking in the early portfolio. Water, flow and environmental transformation become ways of structuring audiovisual behaviour, with sound and image moving through unstable states rather than fixed forms.