Fluid Narratives

Fluid Narratives for Ebru (water marbling), voice, live electronics, and live video

Ebru — the Turkish marbling art of floating pigments on water to produce marbled images — is one of the oldest forms of gesture leaving a trace. Fluid Narratives takes this practice as both instrument and conceptual frame: a performance where the same physical action that produces an image simultaneously generates sound, where craft and computation share the same origin point.

The Ebru tray functions as a gestural interface. Movements on the water surface are captured through contact microphones, accelerometers, and live video tracking, and analyzed in real time through custom Max/MSP patches that control multichannel sound spatialization and electronic transformation. Granular synthesis, spectral freeze, and physical modeling processes allow the fluid dynamics of the water to shape evolving timbres and resonant structures — the material behavior of the surface becoming audible.

The voice moves through the piece as a narrative thread. Sung fragments, spoken text, and extended vocal techniques enter into dialogue with the electronically generated textures, negotiating the boundary between embodied storytelling and computational process. Neither fully governs the other.

A live camera projects the surface of the water in real time, making visible what is usually transient: the microscopic choreography of pigment, wave, and gesture. Sound, image, and movement share a common cause.

Rooted in questions of cultural memory and transformation, Fluid Narratives asks what it means to treat an inherited practice as a living instrument — and what kinds of stories only water can hold.

www.fluidnarratives.com

Duration: approx. 15-20  minutes

Eda Er is a composer, multimedia artist, and vocalist working between Paris, Strasbourg, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her practice merges storytelling, sound, and visual media to create immersive interdisciplinary performances exploring memory, identity, and cultural transformation.

Her recent work centers on transforming traditional Turkish Ebru (water marbling) into a gestural audiovisual instrument — an approach through which she investigates the meeting point between inherited craft traditions and emerging technologies, developing new modes of sonic and visual composition.

Er's work has been performed internationally by ensembles including the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Multilatérale, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Atlas Ensemble, and San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, among others. She is the 2025–26 George Ladd Prix de Paris Fellow, currently a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at HEAR Strasbourg working with Tom Mays. She is completing a PhD in Music Composition with a Designated Emphasis in New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. Alongside her compositional work, she studies contemporary vocal repertoire with Nicholas Isherwood at the Conservatoire du Pays de Montbéliard and composition with Yann Robin in Paris.