Cameron J Laing

'Natural Forms is the result of 7 years of specific exploration culminating in the discovery of this new methodology in 2025. The work focuses on environmental audio as a source of sustainable audio and simulacra; the representation of the real in the digital age of AI and algorithmic intervention. Its process involves using field recordings (or live mic input) fed into an instrument system centred around the NornsShield, MIDIgridand sample playground script to create a generative real-time, improvisational performance. Through live manipulation, the familiar environmental textures are intuitively glitched, stretched, and re-animated, evolving organically from the authentic 'real' into a new, hyperreal composition of rhythm and melody. This transformative approach explores the space between the natural world and its digital representation which has its roots connected to the concept of Simulacra by the French theorist and author Jean Baudrillard.

As an artistic practice it is an ongoing investigation into the space between the authentic 'real' of the natural world and its technologically mediated representations, building auditory bridges that allow us to perceive the hidden rhythms and silent communications of the more-than-human world. Within the performance space it invites the audience to join the composer on a deep listening exploration. The constant evolving sound and harmonically rich textures requires adaptability as the glitched, digital artefact becomes anew, hyper-real experience that questions our very perception of nature and our symbiosis as humans, with the notion that only distortion utilised in the right way can lead to harmony.

Transference: This practice-led research explores "Transference" as a fundamental principle of interaction across psychological, ecological, and artistic domains. It investigates how patterns are projected from one state to another, creating irreplicable outcomes through feedback-driven processes.
The research is enacted through a real-time dialogue with a closed-loop audio feedback system; a self-oscillating feedback loop that is an autonomous, chaotic entity. This system isa microcosm of the following key models:

The Psychological Model (The Projected Pattern):Drawing on Freudian theory, the system embodies "transference”; the act of projecting the old dynamic (the chaotic feedback signal)onto a "new situation" (the temporal structural grid imposed by the artist), not to control it, but to engage with it as an embrace, to induce a different, relatable outcome.

The Ecological Model (The Self-Regulating System):The audio feedback loop and delay mirrors closed-loop systems in nature, such as nutrient cycles or predator-prey relationships. These systems self-regulate through feedback, where the output of the system (e.g., a population's size) becomes an input that stabilises or destabilises the whole. Similarly, the audio output is fed back into itself, creating a living, evolving sonic ecosystem.

Sculpting the Irreplicable: The performance is an improvisational dialogue with the system.
The artist acts as a sculptor, working with the "grain" of the raw audio signal to reveal latent
forms. The value of the outcome is its ontological singularity; each performance is
an irreplicable event, making the resulting composition irreplaceable as a document of that
specific interaction.

While Natural Forms and Transference manifest independently as two distinct sonic processes, their bond is conceptually implicit. Natural Forms sources the authentic relativity of our environmental world(the field recording), and through a process of glitching and granular manipulation, it generates a hyperreal representation that questions its origin. Transference operates in a parallel vein, beginning with the naturally induced occurrence of a self-referential signal, that is excited and sculpted as its natural form before being corralled in the grid, and through acts of projection and sculpting, endows it with the ecological and psychological complexity within its reverential self.

Together, these methodologies form a continuous cycle of inquiry into perception itself. One deconstructs nature into artefact, the other constructs artefact into nature. Both are fundamental acts of transference, filtered through a mediating system to produce an unduplicatable outcome. This unified practice challenges the listener to perceive the hidden rhythms in the natural world and the emergent nature in the synthetic, exploring the beautiful ambiguity at the threshold of the real'.

Further developments in Cameron’s process and work can be found on his website and socials.