A. Di Scipio and M. Guerra

Performance with painting and electronics (adaptive live signal processing)

- commission of Champs d'Action

Some approaches to painting have a inherent temporal and performative element to them. In this work, we assume such an element to be "musical",and therefore we set out to listen to it.
We explore this music, i.e. the sounds created by painting, scraping, and digging into the surface of wooden panels, and the way these actions develop in time.
The different manners of, and different materials used for, impacting the wooden surface,provide indeed a restricted but varied enough palette of sonic gestures, which get amplified and projected into the room. When the total room sound becomes loud enough or denser than a given treshold (which itself depends on the room hosting the performance), a computer (Kyma) starts processing these sounds, enlarging them into a dynamical and turbulent texture. The sonic texture in turn affects the timing and the pace, and the minute details too, of the actions impacting the surface.
Thus, the composition effectively consists in a dynamical network of purely sonic interactions, and the result emerges from the instable equilibrium between human actions (their musical character), the machine (changing its behaviour depending on the sounds of human actions) and the room, the house, the oikos (its acoustics, its main resonances, the "timbre" or "voice" of the material space hosting performers, machines, and audience).
Similarly, on the wooden surface, part of the composition derives from the dynamical interactions between the physical elements utilized by the performer in specific timings, what is revealed on the surface is the process of the elements towards a point of equilibrium yet to come, process that altered in time creates a multi layered texture, which holds in its self part of all that has been seen and is material for new visualizations.

The audio result is the traces left by a process in sound reflecting the musical element of painting. The visual result is the traces left on a surface reflecting the music of working-out the surface itself.

Agostino Di Scipio, Matias Guerra