Palace 64: Impossible Virtual Roller Coasters as Musical Scores

In Palace64, a major new multidisciplinary project combining video and chamber ensemble, I examine the ways in which the domains of music composition and virtual roller coaster design might influence one another. First, I briefly discuss existing artistic projects relating to roller coaster design. Second, I present my own early artistic explorations combining music and virtual roller coasters. Finally, I discuss Palace64. In this project, I create a new medium of score that combines oral transmissions describing imaginary impossible roller coasters with videos created using innovative 3D roller coaster design software (NoLimits 2). Using strategies pioneered by Éliane Radigue and Jennifer Walshe for interpreting imagined images and paths as musical material, I develop ways in which performers can "read" these impossible roller coasters—remembered and virtual—as scores. Ultimately through this project my goal is to create and demonstrate a hybrid artwork that exists not only as a score to facilitate the performance of experimental music, but also as a conceptual theme park ride that traverses the boundaries of possibility and impossibility in a region that marries the digital with an embodied human experience of risk and pleasure. This paper is intended as an accompaniment to the performance of Palace64 by Decibel New Music Ensemble.