This project began as a simple experiment with live coding softwares; Strudel and Hydra, but gradually unfolded into a study of attention under pressure. Working with layered synthesis and evolving rhythmic structures, I was interested in how sound could emulate the experience of being online, not as a neutral space of access, but as an environment that constantly competes for cognitive bandwidth.
The internet presents itself as an infinite repository of knowledge, yet it is equally a site of friction, saturation, and emotional volatility. While building the piece, I kept returning to this duality: streams of information coexist with streams of anxiety; war updates, political noise, conspiracy loops - entangled with fashion cycles, new music releases, celebrity culture, and endless micro-events. Everything arrives flattened into the same temporal plane, demanding simultaneous attention. The composition process mirrored this condition by layering competing sonic elements that numb down and gradually lose distinction, dissolving into a dense field.
Rather than structuring the work linearly, I allowed it to accumulate. Patterns repeat, interfere, and erode one another, reflecting a mind that is no longer filtering effectively but absorbing indiscriminately. Over time, clarity gives way to saturation, a slow cognitive erosion shaped not by absence, but by excess.
Visually, the work draws from the sensation of moving through an industrial warehouse filled with thick, sulphuric air, a space that feels both toxic and strangely immersive. Within this environment, sound becomes a form of enclosure and escape at once: something that engulfs, but also offers temporary coherence. Hydra visuals echo this atmosphere through shifting, unstable textures that resist fixed form, suggesting a landscape that is continuously rebuilding and collapsing.
The piece situates itself within a present-day reading of the post-anthropocene, not as a distant speculative future, but as a condition already underway. We inhabit systems we have constructed yet cannot fully comprehend or control, endlessly producing and consuming their outputs. In this sense, cognitive erosion is not an endpoint, but an ongoing process: a negotiation between the desire to stay informed and the impossibility of holding everything at once.
Strudel + Hydra ยท live-coded audiovisual study.
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