The Collapse, The Light, The Moment: ATOTAL at FEED

The night that did not arrive

By Edward Patrick Kranz, PH’KAKI Creative Works
For one night, the universe blinked, and Erie watched it through the storm.

Sometimes the article you write is not the one you planned. Sometimes it becomes the one it needs to be.

ATOTAL was meant to arrive in Erie by road, moving east from Cleveland through a fast-intensifying Great Lakes storm system. Snow fell hard and sideways. Roads closed unpredictably. By late afternoon, the decision was made. The risk was not arriving in Erie. It was leaving. Franck Vigroux and Antoinee Schmitt, scheduled to fly back to France the following morning, faced the real possibility of being stranded between cities.

The call to cancel was careful, responsible, and entirely human.

FEED Media Art Center notified ticket holders as early as possible. Most people stayed home, trusting the call. A small number still arrived, coats dusted white, boots soaked through, faces red from the cold. They came anyway, not for spectacle, but for the night itself.

The black box remained. The chairs stayed. The lights were still lowered. No stage setup waited behind a scrim. No instruments occupied the floor.

Instead, FEED offered something rare.

As a gesture of apology and trust, Vigroux and Schmitt sent an unreleased, limited-edition video recording of ATOTAL. Not documentation. Not a trailer. A full performance capture, used sparingly when cancellations like this occur.

The decision was made to proceed.

The room went dark.

The crowd was small. Intentionally small.

Most of the people present had already come for the opening of A Map of Everything, FEED’s concurrent exhibition exploring systems, networks, and the human impulse to visualize totality. That exhibition had primed the room. Viewers were already thinking about scale, collapse, and the limits of comprehension. ATOTAL did not interrupt that context. It extended it.

This mattered.

There was no audience energy to feed off. No anticipation of a live performer entering the room. What remained was attention stripped of expectation.

That absence clarified everything.

It would be easy to say the artists were not there. That would be untrue.

From the first seconds, the audio carried weight. Low frequencies pressed against the ribs with the same authority described throughout this series. Light arrived as a thin, deliberate incision across black. The projection filled peripheral vision. The room responded the way it always does when something serious happens. It went quiet without instruction.

Without bodies onstage, without visible labor, the system itself became the performer.

Antoinee Schmitt, long described as an elusive figure, a visual architect who prefers systems over signatures, felt paradoxically more present in absence. His code did exactly what it was designed to do. It listened. It responded. It chose when not to.

The opening movement felt almost deceptive.

Tight synchronization. Hard edges. A pulse that could have belonged to a late-night dance floor inside a science-fiction film. It was easy to imagine ATOTAL as something adjacent to club culture, something driven by rhythm and control.

That illusion dissolved quickly.

As outlined in When Sound Meets Light: Anatomy of ATOTAL, synchronization is bait. Unity exists to be dismantled.

Sound began to shed rhythm. Beats softened into pressure. Pressure dissolved into texture. Texture thinned into silence that carried mass. The image followed suit. Grids loosened. Swarms fragmented. Motion lagged behind sound by just enough to register as thought rather than error.

The Matrix fell apart.

What followed was not escalation. It was erosion.

The work did not grow louder or brighter. It grew more fragile. The image remembered longer than the sound asked it to. Trails lingered. Responses arrived late. Silence became a force.

Watching this through video did not diminish its power. It refined it.

Without the reassurance of live presence, the audience had nothing to anchor to except perception itself. There was no applause cue to reset the nervous system. No performer to watch for signals. Only behavior unfolding in time.

Something less arrived. Something more followed.

The earlier essay Why Erie Matters argued that this city understands how to sit inside uncertainty. That claim was tested and confirmed.

No one demanded spectacle. No one treated the screening as a consolation prize. The audience stayed present. The room stayed intact.

Erie did not ask ATOTAL to pretend nothing had changed. It accepted the shift in form and met the work where it was.

That acceptance is not passive. It is trained attention.

The final minutes unfolded slowly.

Sound receded into near-silence. The image trembled, then emptied itself with care. The system seemed to remember itself, then let go.

When the lights came up, no one rushed to speak. Some people remained seated. Others stood quietly, snow melting onto concrete.

This is how ATOTAL exists when it is not live. In memory. In pacing. In the altered way people reenter weather.

There are no photographs accompanying this piece.

There was no live performance to document. The artists’ video was shared privately, with clear boundaries. FEED does not have the right to reproduce stills from that recording, and even if it did, doing so would betray the night.

Images would flatten what was essentially an act of listening.

This article remains unillustrated by design, staying true to the conditions under which the work was experienced. Absence is part of the record.

The collapse still happened.
The light still taught.
The moment still arrived.

What changed was the medium. And that change sharpened the meaning.

Totality is an illusion. Presence is conditional. Meaning survives translation.

ATOTAL did not fail to happen in Erie. It happened differently. That difference became part of the work.

Outside FEED, snow continued to fall. Roads remained uncertain. Somewhere between cities, Vigroux and Schmitt were ensuring they could return home safely.

Inside, a small group of people had just shared an hour of concentrated attention shaped by sound, light, and a system designed to fall apart gracefully.

For one night, the universe blinked.
Erie did not look away.