Mothership

Mothership transforms the audience into a distributed speaker array. Instead of projecting sound from the stage (which would have been easier), the piece unfolds across dozens of audience cell phones scattered throughout the hall. Each phone becomes a tiny satellite in a larger sonic network, surrounding listeners with fragments of sound that drift, echo, and reorganize across the room.

When the Mothership arrives (announced by the on-stage loudspeakers) the audience devices activate, transmitting increasingly dense signals across the hall. For a time, the room fills with a swarm of small, imperfect speakers cooperating in a shared sonic field. Eventually the stage begins to abduct sounds from the audience, pulling fragments of the texture back toward the front of the hall. The Mothership departs as abruptly as it emerged, leaving the audience devices to return to their original orbit.

The piece plays with the strange intimacy of personal technology. Cell phones are normally tools for private listening—earbuds, notifications, small individual moments. In Mothership, those same devices are briefly conscripted into a collective instrument. For a few minutes, the audience’s phones stop working for their owners and start working for the music.