Tacit Sound at MCA Chicago

Jesse Dorris -- Interior Design, 10/1/2012 3:11:00 PM

Tacit Group performing "In C." Photo: Sangwoo Park.

Remember cyberspace? That alternate reality accessible through helmet, goggles, or screen? What once seemed like a vast, unknown world of unparalleled access and communication has shrunk, Alice in Wonderland-like, into a present where any four people in a hotel lobby are in cyberspace as much as they are in their club chairs. The design implications are only now being manifested - phone chargers in couches, every room a wi-fi hot spot - but the online world our eyes and especially our ears explore must be considered, as well.

All this headiness becomes playful thanks to South Korea's Tacit Group, who take the lighter futurism of pioneers like Kraftwerk and bring it into this brave new world of chat, gaming, and real-time audiovisual editing. A group of six computer music composers and producers, Tacit was founded in 2008. Just four years later they won the Asian Arts Theatre's 2012 Project Development Initiative, one of Asia's most prestigious awards.

Their upcoming performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago will offer several demonstrations of the world they represent. A performance of Terry Riley's masterpiece In C includes not only audio representations of Riley's note clusters, but visual ones as well, tying sound and vision together to erase the distinctions between them. Their original composition Game Over is, in their words, an "anti-Tetris," in which the object is not that amiable building-block progress, but instead a battle for space and sound.

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