Two teenage girls go for a hike. At some point, one of them steps off the path for a moment. A minute later, her friend hears a strange sound. She pushes through the bushes, but no one is there. Her friend is gone — disappeared. Many years later, we see the surviving woman again. One evening she is staring at the landscape painting in her room. She says the paintings seem to open “inward” onto the wall, “not like windows, but like doors.” She thinks she can see her lost friend inside the painting — not among the trees, but constituted by them. She says: “There are no backgrounds in any of these paintings, no vistas; only a great deal of foreground that goes back and back, endlessly, involving you in its twists and turns of tree and branch and rock.”

This is the premise of a short story Margaret Atwood wrote in 1990. I took it as inspiration to create what I call a tabletop tape-loop micro-opera — a series of tabletop performances using obsolete music machines and effect boxes to explore the themes outlined in Atwood’s story. The piece is an investigation into what a purely YouTube-based composition might be: not something translated into an online format after the fact, but something conceived and created for the YouTube platform as its primary stage of performance.