Zhuo Mengting

Zhuo Mengting is a Chinese performance artist and sound artist based in London. Her practice tries to create a poetic, quiet and intimate experience in a world full of noise in chaos. Originally she comes from an academic background in performing arts that recently has taken a shift towards sound arts, utilising some skills and techniques from other forms of performance art into sound. Mengting’s has then went into getting commissions from relevant artistic institutions, as the Migration Matters Festival, and performing in venues such as Cafe Oto in London.

Duet for Portable Speakers – Is a project of Mengting were she collaborates with fellow performance artist Li Song and its an ongoing performance series in various sites. The performance explores new ways of sound making through the use of portable speakers amplifying contact microphones, interacting with both in a theatrical manner to create a dialogue. As she explains of the interaction between performance and sound “This collision of disciplines amplifies the tension and creates a unique dialogue, pushing the boundaries of both fields”. In the performance Mengting and her partner start a dialogue by using the contact microphone and creating feedback with portable speakers. Combining different material to be picked up by the microphones and mirroring the sound with body movements. The following video is from their performance in Next Festival 2022, as you can see in the video they utilise different material, such as a fan for example, to evolve the tone of the performance and explore new sonic territory.

This performance reminds me a lot of Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music, an installation where microphones hang from the ceiling, oscillating on top of speakers creating feedback. I really like this project, I think the dialogue is interesting, created by what is supposed to be the unwanted or noisy aspects of the technology used. As well I find it very impressive how much could be said with the limited amount of materials and interactions.

This piece and Mengting’s work fuels my interest of creating some sort of performance with my M4L device, in specific one that breaks away with regular medium and environment where M4L devices are used, like in music or DAW’s. Last year in creative computing, I learned the basics of Arduino creating some scripts where I controlled parameters in Pure Data with physical analogue potentiometers. This performance inspired me to maybe create a very rudimentary physical controller were I could control some parameters of this device for a performance. I could make use some sensors or potentiometers in the controller, transforming some how the device and its performance.