Kittys, cars, and asynchronization

Yesterday I went to the "Cross Talk Series" performance at the University of Utah. This concert involves students from the U as well as BYU, who are in the computer music composition class. I can't believe how lousy it was.
There were a few neat ones like the kid who hooked some sort of sensing electrode thingy up to his chest and his breathing controlled the sounds being synthesized. That was cool. Most of the entrants from the U had some sort of picture collage thing controlled via MAX/MSP which is a synthesis tool. Why they use it to control pictures I will never know. The pictures are very pixelated, the motion is choppy and well lets just say some people could have been nabbed for copyright infringements. Most of the pictures were just lame landscapes or pseudo thought provoking dribble. A pixelated mess that is supposedly a photo would show on the screen. Then it would jerk to a zoom in setting, click, wait, click, wait. Then some weird pixelly filter would be put on it, then it would jump to another photo of shoes. Seriously, one was a bunch of different shoes and a cat. There was one that had a bunch of nebula photos and star photos and the like and there was this point when a galaxy photo started slowly rotating and falling away and I had a hard time not makeing my laughter audible. It was so bad, there is no way to say how bad it was. Check out this video and it will give you a hint at the quality, except this might be better.
The music was actually of a higher caliber than years past for the most part; still some pretty bad stuff came out.
So it is not that the images sucked or the little spell check and grammar check squiggles showed on the power point of visuals, it is that the performers seemed to not care. It makes me ill to my stomach seeing this stuff performed. How could they not notice that the photos look like crap and are jerky as they move about? How could they not notice that the squiggles were showing. It seems if they looked outside of their cave for maybe half a day they would realize that writing a piece intended for visuals needs some sort of compelling visual element. The composers get stuck on the idea of having to make some musical "masterpiece" full of interesting sounds and hoaky gimicks for composition, and they forget to LOOK at what they are doing. Open your eyes please (and some need to open their ears). If you are making me laugh uncontrolably at your work, something is wrong. If you want to use photos that meld and are altered and whatnot, excellent. Don't use MAX/MSP to do it though. Five minutes with iMovie and you could have something infinitely better.
I am just ranting about close-mindedness. I will stop.
The photo of the post is something beautiful from the Uintahs to break up my frustration with close-minded crumb bumbs.
p.s. Pete I think I saw your mate Paul Jacobsen at the event. Not entirely sure it was him, but pretty sure.