The series of festival performances, called »Permutations II«, will present various attempts to reimagine the roles of the performer and the audience in the field of live electronic music. They take place within the context of the exhibition »Is it working?«.
The artists performing are Yannick Hofmann, Dan Wilcox, Ansambel PRSA and J.B. Arthui: 55H22. The pieces by the ZKM | Hertz Lab's Yannick Hofmann and Dan Wilcox will be live-streamed from the ZKM Kubus to the festival and online audiences.
»Is it working?« is an introduction to the eponymous festival, organized by the Ljudmila association between August 24 and 28, 2020 at several locations around Ljubljana, as a part of the European network of educational and art institutions, EASTN-DC. The network discusses new shifts in digital paradigms at the intersection of art, science, and technology, with a particular focus on interactive, haptic, and multimodal principles. The exhibition presents works which use a variety of presentational and interface strategies as well as digital technologies to achieve diverse modalities of interactivity.
Figure-ground deals with the mental and cognitive processes oscillating between reflection and dissociation. As part of the performance, an audiovisual collage is created in real-time. Both the visual and the sonic layer aim at creating a kind of pareidolia effect. Utilising a real-time Canny edge detector, the outlines of a performer’s fragmented self-portrait feed a Gray Scott Model of Reaction Diffusion. Its values control the parameters of an electro-acoustic soundscape which has been derived from electronic manipulation of natural sound objects, amplified small sounds and field-recordings. The audiovisual real-time performance system was developed by Yannick Hofmann during the 2020 Corona lockdown.
robotcowboy is a wearable computing platform to explore new types of man-machine music & artistic performance. Embedded computing, custom software and audio electronics are utilized to build portable, self-contained systems which both embed and embody the computation on the performer. This cyborg approach is both empowering and compromising as new sonic capability and movement are offset by the need for electrical energy: elements of tension between human and system. robotcowboy shows are always live and contain aspects of improvisation, feedback with the audience and an inherent capability of failure, i.e., the live in live performance.
