While we're in the planning stages for this coming season, I thought I'd post a little something from our past for anyone who may not have seen it at the time. 
Casey Farina is a composer, sound designer and installation artist who's put on some pretty interesting stuff in Chicago in the last few years.  One that particularly sticks out is project CONDOR, which involved a bunch of small blimps, each with speakers attached, flying around the Broadway Armory playing music.
We performed a piece by him in 2007 called bitsmoke, which is a video score-- it's a 15 minute long video projection, entirely black and white abstract shapes.  It's meant for 4 performers, but the instrumentation is not specified-- it could be 4 flutes, or 4 different brass instruments, or a xylophone, a tuba, an accordian and a singer.  Whatever.  Each performer is assigned a quarter of the screen to follow, and is supposed to make sounds based on what's happening in their quadrant.

white= sound
black= silence

Here's a video of the score, with the recording of our first performance of it in 2007:




It's such a cool piece, because it really makes the performer and audience think about the relationship between visual images and sounds.  Like, what do a bunch of rapidly flashing squares sound like?  vs  What does a smoky cloud sound like?  As listeners or musicians, we all have metaphors for music-- that it tells a story, or that it behaves like a spoken language, etc-- which help us understand music in different ways.  This new one, "what would that sound look like or what would that image sound like?" can provide a new insight, one maybe particularly well suited to the (often rather abstract) aesthetic of contemporary music.

Third Coast performed bitsmoke again in January of 2009 on the Sonic Inertia concert series at Sherwood Conservatory.  That venue allowed us to set up the four of us around the audience, so everyone got to hear the four different quadrants coming from different directions.
Bitsmoke works particularly well for percussion (in our opinion) because of the wide variety of sounds at our disposal-- we can really give different shapes their own sound character.  The performance above used a toy piano, rice bowls, cowbells, cymbals, log drums, some hand drums and more...