Video Pieces, Performances, and Presentations

The Temptation of St. Anthony (2023) for stereo audio and single-channel video

This work is a musical exploration of a topic depicted by many painters throughout history, The Temptation of St. Anthony. This is also the subject of a novel by Gustave Flaubert. The video synchronizes a variety of paintings on the topic throughout history, with the music I wrote, and with text taken from Flaubert's novel.
Color and Sound Study on Paper (2022) installation for TV, projector, and vellum.

This video is documentation of the installation being presented at the 2023 SEAMUS Conference at NYU's Bobst Library. The installation consists of two videos, one playing through a TV and the other playing on a projector pointed at the TV. In order to see the projected image on the TV, two sheets of vellum are taped to the upper and lower third of the TV. Inverted colors and black gradients are used in different places in both videos to allow various color effects to occur through cancellation and combination. Recorded paper sounds are used to generate colored grid-based patterns to highlight the multiple "sides" of paper as a medium, sides that include the auditory qualities, the transparency, the spatial qualities, and the textural qualities.
Assassins (2022) for single-channel video and audio.

This piece uses a self-shot video of an assassin bug walking across a railing (with a snake lounging nearby) as the template for a sound, text, and video study. The piece was written to address the theme of the Earth Day Art Model Festival 2022, "Pathways Ahead", a theme concerning climate change and biodiversity loss. In this regard, I chose to explore the concept of extinction, the knowledge of mortality, and different states of powerlessness.
"...threaded through" (2021) site-specific installation for 16-channel audio, 6-channel mapped video

This video is a 2-channel audio, 1-channel video document of the installation "...threaded through", which I created as a portion of my doctoral dissertation.

For detailed discussion of the structure and content of the piece, a complete list of citations for all quoted material, and to find the score/installation instructions, you can read the written portion of the dissertation at: digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1833451/
Alma Ma (2021) for any number of performers with any number of instruments improvising freely.

This video is documentation of the performance of  Alma Ma by the Nova Ensemble on March 3, 2021. For program notes and more information on how the piece works, see https://www.mark-vaughn.com/uploads/9/2/7/5/92756956/_alma_ma_score.pdf
|: This Piece :| (2019) for six performers with cellphones and six copies of the program notes for the concert on which it will be performed.

|: This piece represents :|: This piece is a product of :| my intentions, my explorations, and my experiences |: This piece involves :|: This piece uses :| processes and techniques | developed through my intentions, my explorations, and my experiences:||
Twill Quilt (2019), for single channel video and 2-channel audio
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This work uses four different twill patterns as the source material for both the sonic and visual elements of the piece. Having been used for centuries in the art of weaving, these weaving drafts are elements of our cultural heritage, structures of tensile strength, and grid-based, abstract art. As binary patterns, they are easily used as structural elements in a variety of mediums and provide rich material for exploration in audiovisual composition. This piece is dedicated to the artists Amie Adelman, Gabrielle Duggan, and Abby Sherrill, who offered their time, energy, and resources to me in the Fall of 2018, even as the Fiber Arts program at UNT was being shut down. This decision was a reflection of institutional priorities that stem from a long history of devaluing the importance of the fiber arts in "fine art" environments. To begin learning about the fiber arts see their work below:

Amie Adelman: http://www.amieadelman.com/
Gabrielle Duggan: http://www.gabrielleduggan.com/
Abby Sherrill: http://www.abbysherrill.com/
Private and Public: Contemporary Composition and Politics (2018), paper and presentation 

A video recording of a paper presentation I gave at the University of North Texas on March 18, 2019 discussing the relationship between political power, music, and the culture of contemporary composition.
Hours and Yours and Ours and Years (2018), for 3-channel video and 6-channel audio

This piece arranges and juxtaposes archival audio and video taken from three nested communities in the North Texas area, the Division of Composition Studies/the Center for Experimental Media, the University of North Texas, and the city of Denton. Each of these communities provides the theme for one of the videos and the video’s lengths are loosely determined by the size of each community. The piece is meant to make perceptible a reality that is usually invisible; the simultaneous existence of and interaction between seemingly independent, but deeply connected communities within a single geographical area.
Façades (in collaboration with Toto Nava), (2018), single-channel video for 16:27 video display

This work questions the idea of buildings, architectural features, and monuments as static objects. Though these built objects seem permanent from our immediate perspective, they are in fact transient and changing. They are shaped by nature and by the actions, values, and aesthetics of the culture that creates and maintains them. They are shown here not to be fixed and necessary realities, but dynamic objects that can be altered, maintained, or destroyed.
Black and White Fantasia ​(2017), for MIDI piano

Black and White Fantasia is a work for MIDI piano that uses as its basic structural material a group of twelve pulses. The first pulse‘s duration is one-tenth of a second. Each successive pulse is generated by adding this durational unit to itself. Thus the second pulse has a duration of two-tenths of a second, the next has a duration of three-tenths, and so on through twelve. As part of a larger modular work, Monolith, this piece explores the first nine pulses before being cut off by the subsequent module.