viDEO sAVant and Friends: Live Audio Visual Improvisation

[Το κείμενο διατίθεται μόνο στα Αγγλικά] viDEO sAVant makes performances in which the images and sounds are improvised in real-time in front of an audience. A large screen dominates the stage, below or adjacent to the screen are the performers. A projected stream of moving images fills the screen. As the musicians watch the screen, they react to the flow of pictures, the music evolving in response to this visual score. The images in turn in are being composed and manipulated in response to the music. The work is improvisational, with an emphasis on process and the dynamic evolution of the material, as sound and image lead each other back and forth in the mix. While the work is not narrative in the traditional sense there is always an implied narrative in the way that one image follows another. Rather than being driven by a particular story line the outcome is unknown and unknowable. The sequeces of images are driven by impulses and assiciations through a freeflowing process in which every event impacts the next.

"Three aspects characterize this recent spate of live cinema work: first, the works insist on the live interaction of artwork, performer, and audience and suggest the desire for the event and its specificity; second, they propose an interrogation of forms, asking us to contextualize the event within histories of cinema, video, performance, art, and music; and third, the works often play on the liquidity of information and the sense that we exist in a world characterized not by concrete spatial boundaries and fixed temporal coordinates, but instead by a mobile, accelerating experience of fluidity and flows. These three characteristics, then, hover at the boundary of cinema's specificity and its reconfiguration through digital media, as the materials specific to cinema--light, the projector itself, filmic emulsion--become what Marius Walz calls "soft media objects," digital artifacts easily retooled for new use.” Holly Willis, Afterimage, July 2009

viDEO sAVant have been performing since the early 1990’s. The group has appeared in a wide variety of contexts and with a broad range of collaborators. These include performances at Washington Project for the Arts, DC; Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati OH; Living Arts of Tulsa, OK; 21 Grand, Oakland, CA; SUNY Stonybrook, NY; San Francisco Cinematheque. CA; and New Instruments for Musical Expression, Vancouver, BC For this show a special set will be constructed with an emphasis on visual material drawn from science fiction films and television. The image mix will re-contextualize this footage through selection, repetition and juxtaposition, resulting in a new “film” being composed in front of the audience. These images will act as a visual score, driving the creation of the improvised soundtrack.

As the video mixer I am in a position to arrange for my own transportation to Rome, however I am not in aable to bring a band with me. I am working through my Italian contacts to identify some musicians willing to improvise in performance with me for this incontro, however I would also so be interested if the organizers of the event have suggestions about 2-4 players who might be wiling to experiment in improvising music to images.