"Empty Rooms", audio-visual self-organized performance space

(Mixed Media Installation)

Premiered on 29th - 30th October 2010 @ [BOX] Videoart Project Space in Milan, during the Live!iXem Festival 2010 (thanks to VisualContainer)


A Movie made of algorithmically generated "inactive spaces” is projected on a screen.

An overlapped stream of pre-recorded “sound activities” is then diffused from a record player and from 4 different iPods running in shuffle mode, creating recombinant “invisible actions” to fit into the Movie.

A self organizing link between sound and visuals is established via cybernetic procedures defined as interconnected spin networks, produced by a video camera “observing” the movie and by one microphone “listening” to the space placed inside the performance Locus.

The Kyma sound design environment (accelerated by the Pacarana sound computation engine) is then engaged in order to compute the data and perform real-time evaluations between the different types of numerical information (audio-video), producing a “sonorous response” to the asynchronous stream of audio-visual contents.

The synthesized information is then diffused in the performance space again through 4 loudspeakers.

Various types of feedback will take place during this highly dynamic process implying a self regulating behavior that will establish new connections between the pacing of the movie locations and the “sonorous” content produced by the processing of the iPod sound streams.

The Observer will then experience the following layers of information:

- a Real-Time recombinant Movie made of “inactive” locations.

- an Overlapped Stream of “possible actions” diffused by the iPods that fits into the Movie.

- a Sonorous link between the above domains of activities via 4 full range loudspeakers.

The Observer can take into account one or more layers of information (even all of them) in order to create himself a cinematic experience via a correlation process.

More info here:
[Empty_Rooms_eng_booklet.pdf]
[Empty_Rooms_Technical_Rider.pdf]

artists contact: unidentified.sound.object (at) gmail (dot) com
booking: booking (at) usoproject (dot) com
promotion: press (at) usoproject (dot) com

Robby the Robot: Engineering a Sci-Fi Icon featurette

An examination of Robby's design, creation, and pop-cultural impact, a celebrity status that no other robot received until C-3PO and R2-D2 hit the screen.

This short documentary can be found on the "Forbidden Planet - 50th Anniversary Special Edition Dvd (disc 2)". It features interviews with Ben Burtt, director Joe Dante, Leslie Nielsen, and others.

[IMDb]

Live!iXem 2010 - Edition VII

International festival of music, mixed media and experimental electronic art

[a project by AntiTesi (Domenico Sciajno) and U.S.O. Project in collaboration with O' and Die Schachtel]

Live!iXem is a well established event that explores the relationship among sound, music, electronic arts and new technologies. iXem is a project conceived and produced since 2003 by AntiTesi, an organization founded and directed by Domenico Sciajno based in Palermo. Center for self-documentation, research and interdisciplinary development for new forms of Arts, Antitesi focuses on contemporary arts in its diverse expressions, coordinates and organizes cultural events, festivals and exhibitions in music and art.

Festival Live!iXem in October 2010 is divided into two events, a 'preview' in Turin on October 8th, organized with Hiroshima Mon Amour, and the main festival in Milan including live performances, installations and  a workshop, organized in conjunction with O' and Die Schachtel.

The field is transverse. The common denominator is not the genre but the experimentation and research to innovation, helping to explore the variety of approaches to aesthetic guidelines, tools and technological solutions adopted by selected international artists and involved in the contemporary music scene.

After the introductory event in Turin, October 8th - with Live! IXem Preview - the festival appointment in Milan will take place in the Isola area, between the spaces of O', Medionauta and VisualContainer on Friday 29th and Saturday 30th October, from morning until late at night, offering a busy schedule of events.

Among these, the workshop 'Movement of acoustic images' - whose theme is the field recording, its transformations and its reproduction in acousmatic space - will consist of three different phases: the first by a technical approach, the second one by listening to environmental sound sources chosen as points of a hypothetical ideal sound map and the third one with 'on-site' recording of sound events.

This year Live!iXem, is also characterized by a partnership with 'Ear to the Earth 2010 - Water and the World', Festival produced by Electronic Music Foundation/Joel Chadabe, which will take place simultaneously in NYC.

PARTNERS: Roland Italy, SMAP (San Marino Audio Project), MIC (Music Information Centre Norway), Sound Corporation

WHERE: O 'via Pastrengo 12; Medionauta via Confalonieri 2; VisualContainer via Confalonieri 11, Milano | Isola Passante Ferroviario/M2 Garibaldi, M3 Zara, tram 2, 4, 7, 31, bus 82, 70, 43

HOW: All events are free except for the workshop (for which there is a fee of 60 euros) - and for the evenings at Medionauta (5 euro membership card).

INFO:

Antitesi www.antitesi.org 

iXem www.ixem.it

Full program here: iXem Press ENG (pdf)