Our work, “Anthropo Scene,” explores in its totality the variety of intense emotions we human beings experience as a result of existing in a world in which we are dominant. From anxiety around the perpetual fall of nature to industry and urbanization, to anger towards systems and individuals that exploit the marginalized, to comfort among our peers, and to euphoria at the advent of necessary progress, these emotions themselves dominate our collective psyche. We seek to capture them using audio and visual art.

“Anthropo Scene” is divided into an introduction and three parts: “Vapor,” “Cacophony,” and “Redress.” The introduction, featuring a natural and artificial soundscape of New York City, serves to introduce a number of compositional and visual motives which reemerge throughout the work. These saxophone key clicks, breath, and audio samples collected from urban settings. The introduction also begins to show the creation of a painting representative of our project’s ethos. The painting showcases the growth of nature through mycelium roots that are hijacked through that industry and urbanization.

“Vapor,” a name which acknowledges the influence of the contemporary “Vaporwave” musical movement, utilizes both synthesizers and real instruments, namely saxophone and electric bass. This acoustic bricolage, established in an atmospheric, amorphous fashion, is meant to embody the philosophical concept underlying Vaporwave: “Remembering the Future.” In keeping with this theme, the visual component switches between archival footage and modern video. We present an old New York City—an older world—and set it alongside moments of our present reality, challenging us to uncover whether much has changed at all. It also introduces another motive, a recitation by Maythe Cerón of poet Dr. Craig Santos Perez’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier (after Wallace Stevens).”

“Cacophony” begins to congeal the amorphous matter introduced in “Vapor,” just as our ambivalence surrounding the often confusing state of our world often precipitates anger. We characterize this less-liminal (yet still liminal) rage using a more rhythmically decided drum and bass beat juxtaposed against arhythmic and atonal sheets of saxophonic sound, as well as Cerón’s recitation of “Thirteen Ways” distorted using pitch-shifting, among various non-musical samples. Through this rage and chaos, we become witness to destruction, collapse, waste, and protest. Although, naturally, these things sometimes beget community, regrowth, and rebirth.

Our last part, “Redress,” focuses the anger of “Cacophony” into excitement and a sense of community by fully consolidating its remaining arhythmic sections into an instrumental groove, which utilizes samples of The Herb Johnson Settlement’s “Damph F’aint” and Fabulous Caprices’s “Groovy World.” Instruments previously unshapen, like the saxophone and bass, join together with these samples to produce a musical display of jubilation. Here, our visuals focus on homegrown moments of joy, peace, jubilance, and transcendence. Eventually, the exhilaration of this section fades out to a meditative ending, with Cerón and we artists reciting the end of “Thirteen Ways.”