Since I have never been to the NFT or the
BFI before, avid cineaste that I am, I thought I might prove to be a good idea to catch two birds with one stone and check out the
Optronica festival at the NFT.
The overall programme seemed to be targeted at a wide (as in: mainstream) audience but there was a small pocket in the little cinema on Friday night called Optronica Lab at which the organizers were trying out the more experimental stuff in audiovisual performance.
First up was
Vitascope, unknown to me prior to the event but interesting nevertheless. I only found out later that he is actually a VJ by trade and that he was editing sound as "added value" of his performance. Oddly enough, I personally liked the sound more than the images, which shouldn't mean that any of it was bad, but sometimes, the images were flickering a tad too much and were tiring to the eye...
Vitascope's new Optronica performance will be "expanded" VJing, where he improvises both sound and vision simultaneously; mixing four audio/visual sources in real-time with an AV mixer, using each source as a building block for an immersive sound-space. Dynamically welding the ambient sounds of Hannas Barber with the heightened abstract movements of film and audiovisual Flash loops, Vitascope builds an hypnotic, ambient and unique audiovisual performance.
Next up were
Ultre and
Flat-E. Having only known Ultre from recommendations via last.fm, I was intrigued whether the style of his I had previously listened to would be reflected in his live performance and I can say that I wasn't disappointed. I also really enjoyed Flat-E's visuals since they were solely based on "analogue" or organic material but had a rather cinematic quality to it at the same time.
Ultre (Finn) plays a stringed instrument that he's custom built himself to trigger not only sound, but also video loops (he describes it as "a little like a one-stringed electric cello") whilst Flat-e (Robin) overlays visuals specially prepared in High-Definition.
The third act for the night was the "interactive sonic systems team" hailing from Barcelona with their interactive sound-piece called "
reactable". This was by far the coolest new media project I have seen in a while. Simple in its basic interface components, yet able to be set up to complex structures and at the same time very slick and pretty and also rather intuitive to use. I could probably go on and on of how great it was but I let you judge for yourselves. You can also find videos of various performances on their
website as well as my personal
video I took.
The reactable is a multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.
(...)
The reactable hardware is based on a translucent round table. A video camera situated beneath, continuously analyzes the table surface, tracking the nature, position and orientation of the objects that are distributed on its surface, representing the components of a classic modular synthesizer. These objects are passive without any sensors or actuators, users interact by moving them, changing their position, their orientation or their faces (in the case of volumetric objects). These actions directly control the topological structure and parameters of the sound synthesizer. A projector, also from underneath the table, draws dynamic animations on its surface, providing a visual feedback of the state, the activity and the main characteristics of the sounds produced by the audio synthesizer.
Headliners for the night were
Rechenzentrum. Since I have never seen them live I was anticipating their show and although they had sort of a rough stand to perform right after so much audiovisual and tangible bliss by the reactable group, the nevertheless managed to do it very well. Some impressions below.
Labels: Concert, Optronica, Performance, Reactable, Rechenzentrum, Ultre, Video Art, Vitascope
