The long count
The Long Count is a performance series, and a set of scenographies designed for different spatial and cultural contexts, from black box venues to ceremonial landscapes and institutional galleries.
In 2024, The Long Count was presented at the Whitney Biennial as a series of scenographic performances, transforming the museum’s galleries into resonant chambers that positioned indigenous sonic knowledge as both memory and proposition. as both living archive and speculative force—offering a listening experience of pre and post colonial time detuning timelines and vibrational lineages as they unfold.
The project includes collaborations with dancers, choreographers, and lighting designers, and has featured custom instruments and multichannel diffusion systems as part of its evolving material ecology.
The Long Count unfolded from a record that reanimates pre-Hispanic wind instruments through synthesis, machine learning, and live performance. At its core is an inquiry into how ancient sonic technologies—such as Mayan ocarinas, whistles, and flutes—can be activated in the present without subjecting them to Western systems of tonality, notation, or museological containment. The project draws on an archive of archaeological instruments and applies musical information retrieval (MIR) techniques to approximate their original timbral and modal logics. These analyses are then used to build synthetic instruments that speculate on ancestral futures rather than reconstruct the past.
