On the Excenter of a Blind Spot, for Piano and electronics, was inspired by the famous children’s book Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The story tells of a girl named Alice falling through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures. It seems like a simple fairy tale, but it goes much deeper than that. Carroll describes a struggle with self-identity in a very controlled existence, which is conducted by a series of bizarre events. Feeling lost becomes a recurring theme in the book as Alice regularly expresses uncertainty about who she is after she enters Wonderland.
In my piece, the piano, electronic music, and video all become increasingly more distorted until they collapse. The scene becomes a hallucination. In Alice’s story, she discovers the world through uncertainty and self-questioning. Her whole world is based on an experience of hallucination. Hallucination is a mental disorder in some traditional conceptions, but hallucination also often reflects the nature of the mind, perception and our knowledge of the world. How do we perceive the world? Is it an existence of a series of hallucinations?
