[aha] Digicult Videoscreenings - Plateaux Festival 2009

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Digicult Videoscreenings: +39:Call for Italy and Visual Music

Plateaux Festival, Torun - Bydgoszcz
19th-22nd of November 2009, Poland

www.plateauxfestival.pl
www.myspace.com/plateauxfestival

Plateaux Festival is a 4-day festival, 19.-22.11.2009 in Torun and
Bydgoszcz, presenting the newest and most interesting multimedia artists,
praised and prize-winning audiovisual art, experimental films, electronic
and electro acoustic music and vj-art. This year the festival is extended to
run four days and gains momentum. The carefully prepared programme will
surely satisfy even the most demanding tastes. No matter the preferences
everybody will find something for themselves during these intensive days.
Continuing the idea from last year, every part of the festival will be of a
different character. Various artists, different personalities, styles and
ways of expression. What is more, many of the artists will be performing in
Poland for the first time!

Digicult was included in the program of the festival with 2 videoscreening,
curated by Claudia D'Alonzo (+39:Call for Italy Videoscreening) and Marco
Mancuso (Visual Music). The screenings will be project on the nights of
Friday 20th of November and Saturday 21st of November.

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+39: CALL FOR ITALY VIDEOSCREENING curated by Claudia D'Alonzo

The interaction between sound and moving image is the common denominator of
these works, whose makers act in fields sometimes far apart. They have been
invited by Digicult Video Screening for a collective confrontational
opportunity to picture a fertile and multiple scenario, to find common
grounds in the varied Italian electronic audiovisual production of these
last years. The screening features works going from video art to animation,
from graphic design to videoclips to audiovisual synaesthesy, presenting a
range of approaches and methods so as to follow the different tinges of
meaning around what is referred to as 'audiovisual'.

The videoclip is one of the audiovisual means of telling a story. Which is
what happens in "The rain" and "Spiritual Healing". "The Rain", born as a
collaboration between videoartist/maker Virgilio Villoresi and the
illustrator Ericailcane, use the stop motion technique to create an
environment of small things, traces of a delicate tale around desire,
accompanied by the sound of Lou Rhodes (Lamb).  "Spiritual Healing" is
another videoclip, produced by a group of graphic designers and videomakers
called 47th floor, with music by Zu: a gothic voyage that reminds of
Hieronymus Bosch's crazy and distorted worlds. The stop motion technique is
also reinvented by the duo Elec in "Un re del mondo", taken by an
installation where sequences of photographs of a mechanic being become a
video whose mounting is controlled by sound, thus giving life to one only
piece that constantly deviates from predictable schemes, never repeating
itself.

The video "Fino" by Blu (member of OkNo collective) looks like and escherian
fairy tale. The illustrator uses animation to create a never-ending drawing
whose shapes generate other shapes. "Waltz 57", by illustrator, web-designer
and film-maker Niko Stumpo creates, instead, a link between computer
graphics and animation putting up a carillon of abstract shapes that dance
in a visionary, dissolved environment. Graphic design is also the easthetic
reference for the video "Forming", by the group Progettoantenna. They
investigate around the thin line separating creation and decay of a shape
using the 3D technique: lights and shadows trace, cut and develop figures
that are, at the same time, full and empty within a great liquid movement
able to limit and recreate. Zimmer Frei, from Bologna, unite theatre, music,
live cinema and performance under a common idiom, exploring time and its
perception, a main issue in videoart. Their work, "Sodium Pentathol", is a
camera-car subjective sequence-shot taken in Brussel's bypass ring. Fabio
Franchino, an artist that ranges from video to generative art, presents the
video "Am i Born?". A work where sound controls image thanks to a
self-produced software, creating a poetic and intimate abstract path among
inlaid shapes, lights, skin and body. Ogino Knauss, who have been pioneering
research on the urban tissue transformations using video, vjing and live
cinema, are present with "Quantize This", taken from an installation of
theirs which was commissioned by Domus magazine for San Siro stadium in
Milano. It is an investigation on the city of Milano using the concept of
the 'number' as a sign that characterizes this city, ruling over its times
of life. Urban landscape is also the main theme in a video series called
City Scan, by Hfr-Lab, a multidisciplinary and experimental group.
Architectural elements become audiovisual modules to be mixed and
interweaved according to a practice which is half-way between graphic design
and vjing.

>From the livemedia scene, a work called "Infonaturae 1.0". It is a
collaborative work between musician Emanuele Errante and videoartist Mattia
Casalegno, where sound paths and ever-changing pixels create a morphogenesis
on the brink between organic and inorganic. "Oakland", a video of group
Mylicon/en, whose production is an original mix of digital abstraction and
physicity, is also performative. The original TV source dissolves and is
layered so as to become a flow of colours and sound. The exhibition finishes
with the video "Strip Melody", by videomaker Vinz Beschi, who builds a
complex score in the piece "Stripsody di Cathy Berberian" composing plugs
and video fragments that use facial expressions of bewilderment along with
onomathopeic comic-book sounds. Vinz Beschi realizes therefore a very
original piece where voice, images, words and rhythm become elements to
deconstruct and re-use.

More Infos here: http://www.digicult.it/Agency/sections/curating/+39.asp

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VISUAL MUSIC curated by Marco Mancuso

A lot, and indeed almost everything, has been said about video as a means
for communication and documentation but also as an instrument of perception
and experimentation. It is not my intention therefore to add words to a book
that has already been written. Video, compared to other "new media", differs
as it has been an object of research from the depths of the last century, in
an interminable excursus between technical analysis and artistic expression,
between analogical networks and digital euphoria, between narrative methods
and audiovisual synchronies. One of the more relevant characteristics of the
video as an instrument, and its digital audio-visual arborescence that I
think is worth talking about, is its indisputable capacity to transform the
sensorial space that surrounds us into the object of research that
characterises it. At the same time it manages to do so as a hybrid medium,
capable of having different expressive methods within itself and being able
to take on a predominant role in contemporary aesthetics... as well as in
growing electronic mass culture. This is true in the more classical and
narrative examples of what is universally recognised as video art, as well
as in its more graphical derivations, glitches, synchronies and minimalisms.
Video art is therefore a synthesis, a contamination, a renovation, capable
of going beyond the classic expressive methods, a mirror of expression of
distorted sensation of our time, an instrument used to knock down
distinctions and boundaries, expressive methods and categorisations, for a
unique flow of images and sounds, techniques and practices. The Visual Music
fair, originally presented in the Dissonanze festival of 2006 in Rome at
magnificent Theatre of Palazzo dei Congressi, takes its origin from this
seed of thought, presenting itself as a complex and long path toward
fruition of that process of analysis, spontaneous and unstoppable, that has
characterised video and audio-visual research in most recent years.

The main subject in the video "Au quart de tour" from the Belgian artist
Antonin De Bemels is the body, and more particularly the dancing body or
rather its spatial and temporal recomposition, obtained through various
editing and processing methods. "Red Flag" by Dutch artist Bas Van Koolwijc
is an abstract video, produced with software applications that were
developed for the live performance FDBCK/AV. The 'flagging' seen in this
video is of a digital nature entirely, but its logic is based on analogue
video processing. The same logic applies to the computations by which
FDBCK/AV creates a feedback control circuit between audio and video signals.

>From the US collective project "Reline 2", the artists included in "Visual
Music" investigate modern mythology, examine environments, play with similes
between machine and body, and explode form. Through the use of custom
software, unique processing methods, and envelope- pushing applications of
traditional production tools, these works push technical limits and the very
boundaries of style and imagination. Audiovisual works like "Data Flow" by
English collective DFuse in collaboration with the musician Luisin ucl, or
"Drowdown" by video artist Phoenix Perry and musician Brian Jackson, or even
"E3" by Roberto Seidel and "From brown to green" by Scott Pagano and Twerk,
offer an insight into the current world and it's potential future as
imagined through graphic re-interpretations, biotechnology, architecture,
and the environment.

More narrative and cinematographic are the works by the Dutch artist Jan Van
Neuen "Warning, petroleum pipeline" and "Strategie, signe et geste" by the
French videomaker and musician Pierre-Yves Cruaud. In the first one, a
desolate desert landscape is slowly transforming  into a futuristic
industrialized  world. Indefinable  machines are branching  off into more
complex mechanisms which are producing an industrial soundtrack while moving
rhythmically. In the second one, a softly buzzing black field is interrupted
by a light signal and a penetrating sound. In flashes at irregular
intervals, we keep on catching a glimpse of an image. Each time a little
more becomes visible, of what looks like a hand, a repeated movement, a
gesture. Any fluent perception or clear meaning is made impossible for
several minutes, but eventually things come together in a gesture: the
shaking of two hands.

More synesthetic and pioneristic the final works from masters like the
German artist Karl Kliem and the English duo Semiconductor. In "Trioon 1" by
Karl Kliem both elements of the music (by Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto),
an analog piano and a digital sinus wave, are represented by two overlapping
visual elements: the fading sound of the piano by three abstracted octaves
of a keyboard with the keys fading out just as softly as the tones fade from
hearing; in the beautiful "Fbas Furniture", the music is a processed version
of an Eric Satie piano piece that i did with Max-MSP. As Satie was referring
his music to be like audible furniture, i thought i would do a video that
worked as visual furniture. Has something of a modern campfire in black and
white. "Inaudible Cities Part 1" by Semiconductor is the the first in a
series of short films where cities are made up of and controlled by sound.
In this episode, every detail of an urban landscape is built by the sonic
pressures of an oncoming electrical storm. The very fabric of this isolated
world is defined by the noises and frequencies that surround a space in
another aural dimension; for "200 Nanowebbers", the artists have created a
molecular web that is generated by Double Adaptor's live soundtrack. Using
custom-made scripting, the melodies and rhythms spawn a nano scale
environment that shifts and contorts to the audio resonance. As the
landscape flickers into existence by the light of trapped electron
particles, substructures begin to take shape and resemble crystalline
substances.

More Infos here:
http://www.digicult.it/Agency/sections/curating/dissonanze06.asp