The Third Pixel, Hong Kong Institute of Contemporary Culture

Bells and whistles: Samson Young’s ‘The Third Pixel’

If art is all in the timing, then composer Samson Young surely scored a hit here last weekend. His multimedia chamber work The Third Pixel, commissioned by the Hong Kong Arts Festival, was originally cancelled last March when the government failed to grant a performance licence for the scheduled site, an industrial warehouse above a prominent local gallery. Young’s revision (in a new and approved setting) was almost nothing like the original, he claimed; the concept of technology changing the relationship between musician and audience was toned down in favour of a more straightforward electro-acoustic performance.

Yet the questions the piece raised about people’s relationship with the media – passive consumption or active engagement? – seemed extraordinarily pertinent on Sunday. As the concert took place, some 80,000 Hong Kong residents marched in protest over last week’s botched hostage rescue in the Philippines – a crisis whose resonance owes much to the disturbingly immersive real-time (and prime-time) footage of its bloody resolution.

Not that Young himself made any grand claims for his piece. For all its bells and whistles, the goals of The Third Pixel were relatively modest. Young, a Princeton-trained composer and avowed video game fanatic, received the 2007 Bloomberg Emerging Artist Award for a series of Nintendo Game Boy-inspired audio-visual installations and still incorporates vintage video game sounds in his work at the least provocation.

For The Third Pixel, which traces the composer’s experience from youth to maturity, those same sounds – and some accompanying digital projections – were obviously part of the listeners’ lives as well. Few in the audience were over 40, and their response was palpable.

Joined to the music, 13 short movements for amplified sextet (flute, clarinet, viola, cello, piano and percussion), were video projections by Mykola Dosenko and Adrian Yeung tracing the history of visual media, from early digital animation to a local television interview with the composer as a child. Though they often had dubious connections to the music, the projections served their purpose. The playing often scraped and pounded well beyond the usual aesthetic threshold of Hong Kong’s polite listeners, yet with sufficient visuals to hold their attention the audience kept up with the performance gamely.

Towards the end, a series of projections recreated an e-mail exchange between Young and friends about the way media exposure has desensitised our lives. “After 9/11,” one missive claimed, “you have to pull something spectacular for people to feel it.” Like killing a handful of Hong Kong vacationers on live television. (