MEGASTRUCTURE is an A/V live cinema performance built around a pretty simple idea: what if I make an architectural structure that I can actually play like an instrument?

At CREW I’m pretty deep into simulated 3D audio in XR, so audio systems that adapt to the 3D geometry around you. You walk past a window, you hear a sound coming through it. You stick your head inside and it changes. Walls block things, rooms resonate differently, spaces have an acoustic character.

SOOO what if I make a MEGASTRUCTURE made up of multiple cells and environments with different acoustics, and then ring the whole thing like an acoustic body?

I’m not writing a sci-fi narrative, that part is up to your imagination. It’s just a journey through an abstracted space. Some of the cells are huge utilitarian interiors, others might be colourful liminal convention centers, corridors, voids, strange public architecture.

The structure itself is partly generated procedurally using Unreal’s PCG system. Instead of designing one giant building from beginning to end, I’m making architectural modules, rules and constraints that can generate larger structures and variations. So the megastructure is not really one fixed piece of architecture either, it’s more like a system that produces architecture.

That also fits the live coding part nicely. I’m interested in performing systems rather than just triggering finished assets: changing rules, densities, arrangements, movement, sound and potentially parts of the structure itself while the performance is happening.

Visually this comes from a long obsession with Brutalist, Metabolist and utilitarian architecture. The aesthetics are pseudo-realistic, liminal and a bit too glossy. It looks very Unreal Engine, but the engine excels at exactly that: huge spaces, polished materials, slightly artificial lighting, environments that almost look real but somehow don’t quite behave like reality.

The sound will be relatively minimal, mainly coming from my Elektron Analog Rytm drum machine. It has this thick, physical sound that is perfect for exciting the acoustics. A dry hit in a small space is one thing, the same hit in a gigantic concrete void is something completely different.

So rather than making music and putting it inside a 3D environment, the architecture becomes part of the sound itself.

The performance is live coded, which lets me use the same logic to work with sound, camera movement, objects, environments and timing instead of treating the music and the live cinema as two completely separate things.