Performance Fingerprints

Cork School of Music: the collaboration grows

June 2025

Studio notes compiled by Steve Meyfroidt, with Ioana Petcu-Colan, Ross Lyness, Alex Petcu-Colan, Lina Andonovska, and Amy Prendergast.

After our first collaboration session in Belfast, we knew what we needed next: more time, more instruments, and a space where we could start thinking like performers rather than testers.

In June 2025 we met at Cork School of Music and worked in the Stack Theatre over a long weekend. The group had expanded:

The headline for the weekend is simple: the collaboration stopped feeling like a prototype and started feeling like a practice.

Cork School of Music building (June 2025).
Stack Theatre at Cork School of Music during a collaboration session.

Cork School of Music and the Stack Theatre space (June 2025).

Context

Between Belfast and Cork, the drawing system changed shape.

We’d come away from Belfast with two big needs:

In Cork we arrived with a rebuilt setup: the original app had been broken into a modular chain of processes — more like a synthesiser than a single monolithic program. We started calling it Mark Synth.

It could run in two broad modes:

Crucially, it still produced the drawings in a high-resolution space, continuously, with the ability to save snapshots as we worked — so the live performance and the physical work remain connected.

The session

Day one: exercise the system

We spent the first day getting stable in the space and pushing the system to see what it could do. We started with “everything on” configurations — lots of layers piled up — not because that’s a good end state, but because it shows the range quickly.

We also put basic documentation on rails:

Two things stood out.

First: a wall-sized projection is powerful, but it can also be distracting. When the drawing is large and bright, it competes with listening and with the subtle communication performers are used to relying on.

Second: what you see on the screen is only a slice of what’s being drawn. When we zoomed into the snapshots, it was obvious that we were leaving a lot of detail on the table. The system could reward close looking — we just weren’t making that accessible in a live situation yet.

Day two: simplify, then build an arc

With the full group in the room, Amy’s presence made a real difference. She kept nudging us from “trying things” towards “making choices”, and that meant we started treating the weekend as the beginning of performance design.

Instead of running the maximal configurations, we began breaking Mark Synth into simpler chains so we could understand cause and effect.

That simplification helped in a few ways:

We also made a pragmatic change: we removed the bold black foreground lines for the live projection. In physical work those lines (often picked out later with silver leaf) are useful because they hold “the now” against slower layers underneath. But in motion they were too dominant, and they made the live drawing feel more agitated than it needed to be.

By the end of the day, something clicked. The combination of instruments, extended techniques, and movement — plus the drawing’s responsiveness — started to feel like it could sustain a longer form without collapsing into chaos.

Overnight we sketched a rough five-part sequence of configurations: not a fixed score, but a set of “visual chapters” we could move through to create contrast over time.

Day three: a first long-form run

On the final (half) day, Amy proposed a simple narrative prompt to help structure one continuous improvisation: the river.

She outlined five movements (springs, gathering, flow, ecology/texture, sea/return), each with a musical emphasis (percussion, sustained tone, melody, texture, and a final return).

That prompt lined up neatly with our “chapter” idea from the night before, so we combined them and tried a full run with each section lasting a few minutes.

We also got a gentle reminder of what it means to depend on tech in a performance setting: the wireless camera feed failed at one point, leaving us constrained by cable length. Not a disaster, but a clear sign that we’ll need a Plan B and some redundancy as the work gets more public.

Even so, the run held together. It lasted long enough to feel like a piece rather than an experiment, and the room had a palpable energy when everything locked in. At one point, when the drawing visibly responded to Amy’s movement, she blurted out: “I exist!” — which is exactly the kind of feedback loop we’re trying to build.

What changed

Shared language

Breaking the system into simpler chains improved legibility immediately. It didn’t solve everything, but it made it easier to talk in concrete terms:

The “chapter” approach also helped. Even without a strict score, moving through a planned sequence gave everyone a shared sense of where we were in the arc.

Mark-making vocabulary

Cork highlighted two useful directions:

Removing the live foreground lines made space for other behaviours to read. The open question is how to keep what those lines mean (immediacy) without letting them dominate the projection.

Stability vs responsiveness

The weekend reinforced a principle we’d already felt in Belfast: responsiveness is only valuable if the system can also hold.

In practice, that meant:

In other words: dynamics, not constant motion.

Evidence

We left with a lot of material: audio recordings, video, and a large set of snapshots.

Some of the most useful evidence wasn’t “pretty” — it was simply two snapshots side-by-side showing that different inputs really do generate different traces. That contrast is the whole premise of Performance Fingerprints, and Cork gave us more confidence that it can hold, even early on.

(We’ll add a small selection of snapshots and close-ups here next.)

Next steps

Videos