Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/02/2016
4:30 PM - 10:45 PM
Location
Gray Area / Grand Theater
Category(ies)
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Sunday Performances
The final two days of the Recombinant Festival presents evening programs of music-driven audio-visual performances.
Sunday repeats the works Full Zero and Motion Control MODELL 5, and closes the evening with the late Maryanne Amacher’s sonic monument “Plaything”. A droning, spectral masterpiece that will be played precisely from Amacher’s own score, reanimated and amplified live by Naut Humon and Edwin van der Heide.
Sunday night tickets ensure admittance to the entire evening program, as well as the Re-cog-Ignition Symposium.
Sunday Night Performance Works – in order
1. Motion Control MODELL 5 Granular Synthesis: Visuals & Music.
Motion Control MODELL 5 is a performance or installation in which the face of Japanese performer Akemi Takeya is subject to drastic time-based interventions that create in essence a cyborg-like hybrid, between human and machine. A roller coaster dramaturgy following the “life” of the four clones on screens.
Initially premiered in 1994 at the ICA London, MODELL 5 has been described as one of the most brutiful experiments in bringing digital video to a theatrical setting. It uses a technique derived from the principals of sound design called “granular synthesis” but applies this to the rather fat grains of single video frames (visual content and sound). The audio resulting from this aggressive, shattering granulation is largely responsible for translating the familiar human form into the alien machine.
Radically deconstructed and decontextualized, the audio, still in perfect synchronization with but perhaps even more disturbingly abstract than the granulated video-humans, is amplified, multiplied, layered and compressed into an oscillating, pulsating ‘living’ sonic mass. The result of this represents our species uniquely (inhumanly) and in so doing also defines the essential characteristics of machineness – speed, precision, and unnatural control. We witness the machine processing and reforming human presence.
Granular Synthesis is a collaboration between two researchers, Hentschlager and Langheinrich, who specialize in transforming the gestures and noises of human bodies, particularly human heads isolated by video from their bodies, into recombinant, alien screen-based creatures that move, express and distinguish themselves through superhuman performance. In short, Granular Synthesis turn people into machines.
2. Full Zero by Ulf Langheinrich: Visuals & Sound.
Shocking, yet prurient, Full Zero focuses on a total field performance by Chinese choreographer Luo Yuebing. Captured by a remorseless scanning camera, her ephemeral and delicate situation is transformed into an ambiguous body barrage of hypnotic beauty, both sensually and enraptured of the eros and its mortality.
Exhibited on a large screen, the piece imposes a voyeuristic situation upon the audience, where the tension is created in connection with the image flow onto and into the surface as truth or illusion. Seductively disturbing, the work addresses deep desires behind the notions of power in the consummation of ubiquitously available sexual images to viewers in solitude, and in dominion of nothing but their mouse or trackpad. It is essentially about control over people who are addicted to empty images that are inescapable , but uncertain like memories.
Parallel spatial streams of high and low frequency oscillation pulsation textures flood the mesmeric space with vibrational in consistencies derived from a trance induced state of near purity where a kind of perceptive drowning to silence of the listeners syn-aesthetic time discernment is liquidated.
3. Plaything by Maryanne Amacher.
Unequivocally one the most magnificent musical mavericks of the 20th century, Maryanne Amacher leaves to our mortal listening world one of her more personal live-to-multi-channel disc performances comprising her rare departures from structure borne sound.
After studying with Stockhausen and working with John Cage, Amacher took off on her own psychoacoustic flight path, developing work that was critically described as; “hallucinating swarms of biological air from every direction”, “3D illusions of difference-tone ear dances where the sound seems to emanating from inside your own skull!”, “immense volumes that make the frequencies feel liquid -, all-enveloping buzzing rumbles wrapped in sandstorm textures”.
Through multiple residency periods with Recombinant Media Labs in 2000, Amacher designed a legendary ‘airborne audio’ “Plaything” mix, re-amplified from her hand in concert by Naut Humon and Edwin van der Heide. A 50-minute epic epiphany, chronicled by Amacher before her death, ‘Plaything’ is a prime example of RML’s experiential archive of past lives that can still breathe and encircle us today.