Max Cooper

At 85ft tall, The Odeon of Herodes Atticus is one of the world’s oldest venues. Part of the larger Acropolis complex, and a Unesco world heritage site, it was built around 161-174AD by the Greek-Roman politician of the same name. When an artist performs at this unique venue they are under no illusion that the monument is the main protagonist. Max Cooper managed with such mastery to reveal this ancient venue as a canvas so that that the architecture, beauty and history of the space become as much a part of the show as any of his music and visual collaborations.

Conceived in lockdown, and totally crowdsourced, the film is made from voice notes sent in from a variety of the most trusted humans on the planet, and the pictures are made from thousands of donated images sent in from citizens on every continent.

Development and destruction seem to go hand in hand when it comes to human progress on earth. There is a celebration of the human ability to create sophisticated environments in which we inhabit, but also a concern at the price that we are paying for this.

Development and destruction seem to go hand in hand when it comes to human progress on earth. There is a celebration of the human ability to create sophisticated environments in which we inhabit, but also a concern at the price that we are paying for this.

A story about obsession and yearning for the infinite.

In 1974, the mathematician Penrose discovered pairs of tiles that form an infinite plane without repeating patterns. Inspired by this, Max Cooper uses a rhythm fragment of one instrument to compose a percussion ensemble without a single identical loop. Jessica In contributes animated tile ornaments without symmetries that are reminiscent of a mandala and visualise the idea of infinity.

Cities are reimagined as multiplying animated structures stretching off into infinity, telling the story of our endless social growth. (Quote from https://flatpackfestival.org.uk/our-projects/flatpack-2020-online/the-human-factor/)

EMERGENCE is an epic, immersive audio-visual experience, the debut film directed and soundtracked by Max Cooper. The story explores the development of the universe, the creation of unexpected and often beautiful outcomes from simple natural systems, and how complexity, like human beings, can spawn from the immaterial by the action of simple laws embedded in the foundations of reality. In each chapter of the Emergence narrative, the focus is on the beauty of the natural laws and processes in operation, with a mixture of real data visualization and animated film. It interprets the deep structures and principles that give rise to the familiar physical universe, such as symmetries, the distribution of the primes, waves, spatial dimensionality, and the action of the physical forces on matter. Later chapters tackle the emergence of biological forms, thought and eventually a darker turn into the structures and systems of human civilization.

The idea for this part of the story started on a day when there was really heavy rain hitting the roof window at my old flat. I got out my binaural mics and put my head right up by the window with the big raindrops hitting all around. They made nice individual percussive noises, with great spatial positioning, so I decided to use them to seed a piece of music.