Ex Machina Contemplates the Inseparable Relationship Between Human and Machine, Using a Synchronous Smash-Up of Music and Digital Art

This article was published by Triangle Review on 20 March 2025.

Ex Machina (From the Machine) is the last 2024-25 project of the The Process Series: New Works in Development at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is a collaborative project with the StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance, the UNC Department of Communication, the UNC Department of Music, and Hopper Piano & Organ Co. The Process Serieswas created to illuminate "the ways in which artistic ideas take form," and enable audiences "to follow artists and performers as they explore and discover." Artistic director Joseph Megelwants every production to leave audience members and creators thinking, "How do we move forward, having just experienced this work?"

Ex Machina, created and performed by UNC music professor and pianist Clara Yang, showcases Yang on the piano against a giant, thought-provoking backdrop of images produced by media artist and pianist Xuan.

The performance also features Yvette Young (lead guitarist for the math rock band Covet and a Rolling Stone top-ranked musician); Suzi Analogue (UNC's first full-time hip-hop music performance professor and founder of Never Normal Records); and Yili Fan (movement artist, filmmaker, and veteran film instructor at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts).

"Don't tell me anything about the performance," my 14-year-old son (who has played cello and guitar since he was four) said on the way there. "I want to go in with a clean mind."

But I couldn't stop myself from telling him about Yvette Young. Turns out he's quite a fan of math rock (I didn't even know what it was) and had music by Covet in the playlist on his cell phone.

The performance opened with Crystal Prelude No. 1 with Cryoacoustic Orb Installation and Clinamina -- composed by Reena Esmail (with sound installation designers Lee Wesiert and Jonathon Kirk) and Lee Wesiert, respectively -- in which the sound of flowing water trickled against the piano's modern yet sometimes traditional melodies, employing electronic looping and strong digital bass lines that sounded like they came from an organ, synthesizer, amplifier, and other technological music makers.

Meanwhile, a giant screen surrounding the stage displayed Rorschach-like images that transformed into butterfly-scale-like patterns, then what looked like electron-microscope images of hair follicles, before concluding with what resembled splashes of liquid interspersed with slow, crystalline flashes of light, all reproduced in sound by Yang's piano.

The third piece, Deep ConditioNN Redux, composed by Clara Yang and Suzi Analogue, sounded like something you might hear in a Discothèque or Rave. Green, white, black, and pink swirling patterns dominated the screens, as Analogue produced music on her Digital Audio Workstation, breathing sound into a tall, thin microphone as if her mouth were a flute or didgeridoo. Analogue lives with synesthesia; so, for her, music and visual expression are one and the same, an experience she recreates for the audience in Deep ConditioNN Redux.

In Conception, Yang's piano sounded digitized and then harp-like, as Yvette Young seduced a siren-like song from her electric guitar. Among swirling pink and green circles spinning in the background, the music became pop-folk-like and infused with R&B bass, then evolved into the soft tones of a heavy-metal ballad, becoming more resonant and amplifier dominated as the color blue infused the yellow and orange circles now projected on the screens. It was mesmerizing for both my teenage son and me.

Robodream, composed by Phil Young, showcased Yang's technical as well as creative prowess, her hands producing rapidly rhythmical sounds that might be associated with digital bits of data flitting across a computer screen. Yili Fan appeared, wearing a long-sleeved, thigh-length, metallic dress that sparkled as she advanced, emotionless and automaton-like, across the stage, mimicking a robot discovering its ability to move. (After the performance, Fan taught the audience how to produce movements in similar string-puppet-like fashion.)

Subsequent piano solo pieces -- "Phillip Glass Etude," "Hammers on the Moon," "Think that's you -- a personality recognition software toccata" (by Allen Anderson), and "Drones" (by Stephen Anderson) -- incorporated optical-fiber-like light, chromatographic lines. and strings of sentences and words, while Yang's piano produced cacophonic arpeggios and syncopated chords, interspersed with sometimes hymnal-like phrases, sounding intermittently like a harp, bass drum, xylophone, or windchimes made of glass.

The performance ended with Hoyt-Schermerhorn by Christopher Cerrone, a piano solo punctuated by middle- and high-note chords with plenty of echoey silence between. Questions such as "How do you practice compassion?" and "How do you fall apart?" and words such as "resentment," "Let go," and "pain" appeared in messy white handwriting across the screens, evoking the contradiction between society's desires to make machines more human by imbuing them with memories and emotions, and to make humans more machine-like by suppressing their memories and emotions for the sake of capital productivity.

The production was followed by a facilitated conversation during which audience members' experiences were compared with the artists' intentions. I was bracing for my son to start bugging me to leave, but he was just as engaged in the discussion as I was.

The amount of collaboration that went into this two-year-long creation was both obvious and contagious. And the facilitated discussion with the artists after the program was as beneficial for the audience as it was for the artists -- we need to build community among strangers, however briefly, more than ever right now.

Note: The second and last UNC performance of Ex Machina starts at 7:30 p.m. tonight (March 22nd) in Swain Hall. You don't have to worry about parking. We got there 30 minutes early, and someone (it turned out to be The Process Series' artistic director, Joseph Megel) opened the gate so we could park immediately behind the venue.