Half Winged
Half Winged is an immersive musical and visual installation built around a single, devastating question, Are we truly free?
Created by longtime collaborators, composer Shara Nova and visual artist Matthew Ritchie, Half Winged is a choral cantata — part song cycle, part ritual, part elegy — that maps humanity’s oldest pattern: the drive to build something new, something bigger, something more beautiful, only to question it, destroy it and begin again.
This ambitious yet accessible work is anchored in a magnificent 70 minute recursive musical score recorded using a spatialized Atmos sound system and featuring an extraordinary ensemble of singers, AI programs, live and recorded instruments.
Addressing pressing contemporary issues of choice and the impact of technology by drawing on and remixing fragments of texts ranging from the Enuma Elish to Paradise Lost, W.E.B. Du Bois’ Princess Steel, Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, and Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook; Half Winged gives this pattern a structure through a cast of characters in a feature-length multi-screen AI-generated video, named after the programs used in Large Language Models. The Discriminator, entropy’s angel forever facing backward, ; the Generator, the wind of change pressing blindly forward; the Transformer, the Witness, the Gardener, the Weaver, and finally the Child — a character voiced entirely by artificial intelligence — who returns, across every act, to the same unanswered question:
Are we truly free?
This project was generously supported by New Music USA and the Knight Foundation.
