Digicult Videoscreenings: +39:Call for Italy and Visual Music Plateaux Festival, Torun - Bydgoszcz 19th-22nd of November 2009, Poland
www.plateauxfestival.pl www.myspace.com/plateauxfestival Plateaux Festival is a 4-day festival, 19.-22.11.2009 in Torun and Bydgoszcz, presenting the newest and most interesting multimedia artists, praised and prize-winning audiovisual art, experimental films, electronic and electro acoustic music and vj-art. This year the festival is extended to run four days and gains momentum. The carefully prepared programme will surely satisfy even the most demanding tastes. No matter the preferences everybody will find something for themselves during these intensive days. Continuing the idea from last year, every part of the festival will be of a different character. Various artists, different personalities, styles and ways of expression. What is more, many of the artists will be performing in Poland for the first time! Digicult was included in the program of the festival with 2 videoscreening, curated by Claudia D'Alonzo (+39:Call for Italy Videoscreening) and Marco Mancuso (Visual Music). The screenings will be project on the nights of Friday 20th of November and Saturday 21st of November. ---------- +39: CALL FOR ITALY VIDEOSCREENING curated by Claudia D'Alonzo The interaction between sound and moving image is the common denominator of these works, whose makers act in fields sometimes far apart. They have been invited by Digicult Video Screening for a collective confrontational opportunity to picture a fertile and multiple scenario, to find common grounds in the varied Italian electronic audiovisual production of these last years. The screening features works going from video art to animation, from graphic design to videoclips to audiovisual synaesthesy, presenting a range of approaches and methods so as to follow the different tinges of meaning around what is referred to as 'audiovisual'. The videoclip is one of the audiovisual means of telling a story. Which is what happens in "The rain" and "Spiritual Healing". "The Rain", born as a collaboration between videoartist/maker Virgilio Villoresi and the illustrator Ericailcane, use the stop motion technique to create an environment of small things, traces of a delicate tale around desire, accompanied by the sound of Lou Rhodes (Lamb). "Spiritual Healing" is another videoclip, produced by a group of graphic designers and videomakers called 47th floor, with music by Zu: a gothic voyage that reminds of Hieronymus Bosch's crazy and distorted worlds. The stop motion technique is also reinvented by the duo Elec in "Un re del mondo", taken by an installation where sequences of photographs of a mechanic being become a video whose mounting is controlled by sound, thus giving life to one only piece that constantly deviates from predictable schemes, never repeating itself. The video "Fino" by Blu (member of OkNo collective) looks like and escherian fairy tale. The illustrator uses animation to create a never-ending drawing whose shapes generate other shapes. "Waltz 57", by illustrator, web-designer and film-maker Niko Stumpo creates, instead, a link between computer graphics and animation putting up a carillon of abstract shapes that dance in a visionary, dissolved environment. Graphic design is also the easthetic reference for the video "Forming", by the group Progettoantenna. They investigate around the thin line separating creation and decay of a shape using the 3D technique: lights and shadows trace, cut and develop figures that are, at the same time, full and empty within a great liquid movement able to limit and recreate. Zimmer Frei, from Bologna, unite theatre, music, live cinema and performance under a common idiom, exploring time and its perception, a main issue in videoart. Their work, "Sodium Pentathol", is a camera-car subjective sequence-shot taken in Brussel's bypass ring. Fabio Franchino, an artist that ranges from video to generative art, presents the video "Am i Born?". A work where sound controls image thanks to a self-produced software, creating a poetic and intimate abstract path among inlaid shapes, lights, skin and body. Ogino Knauss, who have been pioneering research on the urban tissue transformations using video, vjing and live cinema, are present with "Quantize This", taken from an installation of theirs which was commissioned by Domus magazine for San Siro stadium in Milano. It is an investigation on the city of Milano using the concept of the 'number' as a sign that characterizes this city, ruling over its times of life. Urban landscape is also the main theme in a video series called City Scan, by Hfr-Lab, a multidisciplinary and experimental group. Architectural elements become audiovisual modules to be mixed and interweaved according to a practice which is half-way between graphic design and vjing. >From the livemedia scene, a work called "Infonaturae 1.0". It is a collaborative work between musician Emanuele Errante and videoartist Mattia Casalegno, where sound paths and ever-changing pixels create a morphogenesis on the brink between organic and inorganic. "Oakland", a video of group Mylicon/en, whose production is an original mix of digital abstraction and physicity, is also performative. The original TV source dissolves and is layered so as to become a flow of colours and sound. The exhibition finishes with the video "Strip Melody", by videomaker Vinz Beschi, who builds a complex score in the piece "Stripsody di Cathy Berberian" composing plugs and video fragments that use facial expressions of bewilderment along with onomathopeic comic-book sounds. Vinz Beschi realizes therefore a very original piece where voice, images, words and rhythm become elements to deconstruct and re-use. More Infos here: http://www.digicult.it/Agency/sections/curating/+39.asp --------- VISUAL MUSIC curated by Marco Mancuso A lot, and indeed almost everything, has been said about video as a means for communication and documentation but also as an instrument of perception and experimentation. It is not my intention therefore to add words to a book that has already been written. Video, compared to other "new media", differs as it has been an object of research from the depths of the last century, in an interminable excursus between technical analysis and artistic expression, between analogical networks and digital euphoria, between narrative methods and audiovisual synchronies. One of the more relevant characteristics of the video as an instrument, and its digital audio-visual arborescence that I think is worth talking about, is its indisputable capacity to transform the sensorial space that surrounds us into the object of research that characterises it. At the same time it manages to do so as a hybrid medium, capable of having different expressive methods within itself and being able to take on a predominant role in contemporary aesthetics... as well as in growing electronic mass culture. This is true in the more classical and narrative examples of what is universally recognised as video art, as well as in its more graphical derivations, glitches, synchronies and minimalisms. Video art is therefore a synthesis, a contamination, a renovation, capable of going beyond the classic expressive methods, a mirror of expression of distorted sensation of our time, an instrument used to knock down distinctions and boundaries, expressive methods and categorisations, for a unique flow of images and sounds, techniques and practices. The Visual Music fair, originally presented in the Dissonanze festival of 2006 in Rome at magnificent Theatre of Palazzo dei Congressi, takes its origin from this seed of thought, presenting itself as a complex and long path toward fruition of that process of analysis, spontaneous and unstoppable, that has characterised video and audio-visual research in most recent years. The main subject in the video "Au quart de tour" from the Belgian artist Antonin De Bemels is the body, and more particularly the dancing body or rather its spatial and temporal recomposition, obtained through various editing and processing methods. "Red Flag" by Dutch artist Bas Van Koolwijc is an abstract video, produced with software applications that were developed for the live performance FDBCK/AV. The 'flagging' seen in this video is of a digital nature entirely, but its logic is based on analogue video processing. The same logic applies to the computations by which FDBCK/AV creates a feedback control circuit between audio and video signals. >From the US collective project "Reline 2", the artists included in "Visual Music" investigate modern mythology, examine environments, play with similes between machine and body, and explode form. Through the use of custom software, unique processing methods, and envelope- pushing applications of traditional production tools, these works push technical limits and the very boundaries of style and imagination. Audiovisual works like "Data Flow" by English collective DFuse in collaboration with the musician Luisin ucl, or "Drowdown" by video artist Phoenix Perry and musician Brian Jackson, or even "E3" by Roberto Seidel and "From brown to green" by Scott Pagano and Twerk, offer an insight into the current world and it's potential future as imagined through graphic re-interpretations, biotechnology, architecture, and the environment. More narrative and cinematographic are the works by the Dutch artist Jan Van Neuen "Warning, petroleum pipeline" and "Strategie, signe et geste" by the French videomaker and musician Pierre-Yves Cruaud. In the first one, a desolate desert landscape is slowly transforming into a futuristic industrialized world. Indefinable machines are branching off into more complex mechanisms which are producing an industrial soundtrack while moving rhythmically. In the second one, a softly buzzing black field is interrupted by a light signal and a penetrating sound. In flashes at irregular intervals, we keep on catching a glimpse of an image. Each time a little more becomes visible, of what looks like a hand, a repeated movement, a gesture. Any fluent perception or clear meaning is made impossible for several minutes, but eventually things come together in a gesture: the shaking of two hands. More synesthetic and pioneristic the final works from masters like the German artist Karl Kliem and the English duo Semiconductor. In "Trioon 1" by Karl Kliem both elements of the music (by Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto), an analog piano and a digital sinus wave, are represented by two overlapping visual elements: the fading sound of the piano by three abstracted octaves of a keyboard with the keys fading out just as softly as the tones fade from hearing; in the beautiful "Fbas Furniture", the music is a processed version of an Eric Satie piano piece that i did with Max-MSP. As Satie was referring his music to be like audible furniture, i thought i would do a video that worked as visual furniture. Has something of a modern campfire in black and white. "Inaudible Cities Part 1" by Semiconductor is the the first in a series of short films where cities are made up of and controlled by sound. In this episode, every detail of an urban landscape is built by the sonic pressures of an oncoming electrical storm. The very fabric of this isolated world is defined by the noises and frequencies that surround a space in another aural dimension; for "200 Nanowebbers", the artists have created a molecular web that is generated by Double Adaptor's live soundtrack. Using custom-made scripting, the melodies and rhythms spawn a nano scale environment that shifts and contorts to the audio resonance. As the landscape flickers into existence by the light of trapped electron particles, substructures begin to take shape and resemble crystalline substances. More Infos here: http://www.digicult.it/Agency/sections/curating/dissonanze06.asp _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
