On Thursday, February 21, the Herald Arts desk visited the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) for the main event of its annual Symposium, this year under the theme “Illuminations.”
Upon arrival, we were greeted by a bustling crowd. At a University that claims to be best defined with the word “and,” the CCAM, a collaboration of art and technology, has remained a rather niche, idiosyncratic part of the broader arts scene at Yale. We wanted to know what really laid at the proposed intersection—if as the program promised, data-driven violin duets and raster files could “reveal the unknown,” and “inspire us to envision the yet unimagined.”
The show started with a violin duet piece called “No Time for Delay,” composed by Yale Senior Lecturer of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and CCAM Program Manager Matthew Suttor and performed by Keeley Brooks, MC ’25 and Nathaniel Strothkamp, PC ’26.
With the help of AI, the piece uses a “sound dictation technique to translate mass temperature data into music,” Suttor explained to the audience. Brooks and Strothkamp started playing simple dyads, beginning from the violin’s lower register, inching their way toward the instrument’s higher register, meant as an analog for rising global temperatures. The melody was simple, but striking. The chords wavered between harmony and dissonance. By the end of the piece, the pair had reached such high notes that the violin sounds all sounded like screeches. As the notes passed into the realm of recurrent, shrill wailing, we were faced with a literal siren of global warming. We stood and we listened and we did not turn away. “No Time for Delay” was certainly one of the more conceptual performances; the duet brought a potent warning about climate change to the fore.
Still, there is a sense of irony to the use of AI in a composition warning against the human-driven effects on the climate, given the vast amount of water and electricity required to maintain data centers. We had questions. Could technology produce representations of nature that do not inevitably mar it?
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Perhaps the next piece would provide an answer. As the crowd was asked to rearrange themselves, we were met with a film performance titled “Scattered Light” by New York artists Joshua Mastel and Nico Cadena. The duo used two film projectors, old ones with massive circular magazines on the top. One projector was anchored still and broadcast the primary film, while the second projector was maneuvered around to create the transient second projection. Mastel and Cadena interrogated the concept of texture and layering, getting close to various surfaces, while flattening them with projections
What we witnessed was more than an impressive film performance: vivid frames of liquid pouring onto reflective surfaces, distorting images of birds, trees, and post-dusk bliss. A second projection, reflected in a mirror inside the room, blended with the original, creating a new, fluid unreality.
Towards the end of their piece, Mastel and Cadena took scattered fragments of nature—leaves, chlorophyll, water droplets, chirping birds—and distilled them into the sublime. Here, it was not the crash of oceanic waves or the abrupt rise of a glacier that sparked awe, but rather the labored layers of refraction involved in Mastel and Caedena’s performance. From the spinning of a mobile laden in mirror shards, light danced upon the walls like migrating birds. In the duo’s practiced hands, the machine of film projection became a life-giving force.
On the cold floor of CCAM Leeds Studio, the Herald Arts editors twisted and swiveled our gaze to track the flocks’ relentless, circulatory movements. If, for a moment, it seemed as if the duo had conquered nature by restaging an Ableton-driven-forest-soundscape, we were reminded, by the projector’s whir, of the technological networks required to achieve this feat. To reach toward the pure ephemera of nature—a near-Edenic presentation of a forest floor untouched by human intervention—the artists still leaned on the machinery of the camera and projector.
Once the projection ended, the crowd was asked to shift again. In the Leeds Studio’s black, uncovered walls, it felt like nothing would remain static.
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The Yale Laptop Ensemble entered in a shroud of darkness. Clad in black, the performers started walking in with Bose speakers, filling the room with the soft chime of bells. They assembled in an illuminated line, dutifully holding up the speakers. The program called this piece “Sonic Lanterns.” Monitored by dozens of laptop-bearing overseers, the speakers, alongside other unidentifiable sound systems, created a symphony of electronic sounds. The entire room vibrated.
The audience was encouraged to walk around, moving in and out of the digital soundscapes. Each area had a different sound: some were harmonious like a cathedral choir, while some screeched with cacophonous, mechanical noises. Towards the back of the room, two students seemed to guide the direction of the melody, flapping their arms and vacillating between kneeling/standing positions as the orchestral arrangement soared and fell. Each sound’s source could be discerned distinctly and discretely, but they never clashed in a nonsensical way.
Wherever you stood, you could hear some combinations of noises, but they came together in a way that felt intentional: you weren’t necessarily hearing something appealing, but you knew you were hearing music. The symphony shifted depending on where you were located, incorporating an interactive, spatial element within the music that, at least for the Herald Arts editors, was completely foreign. We were left with the following questions: Has technology become so subsumed into our modes of perception that it is now a necessary condition for artistic engagement? Can artistic creation—both for aesthetic and ethical purposes—afford to ignore the ubiquity and pervasiveness of technology in public spaces?
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For the final act, CCAM Technical Manager and Curator Ross Wightman unveiled five rectangular projections on a wall, side by side. He began operating something on his laptop, moving dials and knobs back and forth like a DJ. On the screens, flashes of colorful, pixelated strips moved in and out, undulating back and forth. Various alien-like sounds accompanied the visual whirlpool. The lines were hypnotic. Towards the end of the performance, Wightman zoomed out. The reveal: he had been capturing and manipulating television frequencies, which were being recorded and then projected onto the wall. Wightman delicately distorted frequencies to create liminal landscapes of sound and image, turning the undercurrent of technological life into something more organic, more primordial.
CCAM not only interrogates new forms of medium and content, but expands the definition of what an art form can be. The Symposium demonstrated several ways that existing art forms—film, music, photography—can be manipulated and deepened through digital techniques. The Laptop Ensemble didn’t just play a piece from their laptops; they created an interspatial experience that enveloped the entire room in one big soundscape. Art and technology have always had a fraught relationship. Many have believed and still believe that machines and computers mar the pure quality of analog artwork. However, CCAM offers a dissent: technology can not only assist artistic creation, but can also generate novel, previously inexpressible ways of expression.
It is perhaps not misplaced to associate our experience at the Symposium with what Frederic Jameson once called the new “technological sublime.” While previously, as in the Romantic tradition, the sublime was contemplated in the vastness and mystery of nature, in our (post)modern times, it emerges from the overwhelming complexity of new technologies that, at least in the eyes of the audience, defy exhaustive comprehension. It is perhaps in this renovated defiance of comprehension that new meaningful artwork is to be found: not in the mere use of technology for artistic reproduction—distributing and proliferating expression—but in the creation of new, unique experiences of our incomprehension, disorientation, and smallness against the world.
If, as Walter Benjamin warned, technology strips artistic creation from its aura by perfectly reproducing it beyond its “unique existence at the place where it happens to be,” then the CCAM Symposium suggests a different possibility. The performances were not mere reproductions but were crafted as unrepeatable encounters—soundscapes were sculpted into space, images flickered into being, and technology became not a tool of replication but one of ephemeral creation. We were left with the hopes that artistic creation, rather than being eroded by new technological forms, can instead be reimagined in ways that better resonate with the conditions of our time.