[spectre] Sing to Me and Tell Me Your Story

[Marc Lafia]

For those of you in Tel Aviv -

'Sing to Me and Tell Me Your Story'
Marc Lafia and Dana Levy
@Holon Digital Art Lab
 www.digitalartlab.org.il
Opening Oct 10 through Dec 10th 2002

Singing is often the most heart felt way to communicate emotion and a sense
of being.  Songs come from many varied places and have long and fractured
lineages. In this 4 screen computational video installation, Marc Lafia and
Dana Levy are in search of the traversal of song, rhythm, language and the
movement of people, and through computation aim to tease out underlying
correspondences, forgotten connections, across time and geography. Over 50
people from 35 different countries now living in Tel Aviv, were invited to
sing a song from a place of true and genuine emotion, and then to tell the
story of their sentiment. The songs and statements, in many languages are
interwoven, sampled and remixed, continually shifting context opening up
problematics and complexities of the notions of =8Chome=B9, =8Cbeginning=B9,
=8Cbelonging=B9, =8Cadaption=B9 and =8Cbeing=B9 - ideas of here and elsewhere and the
traversing of time.

The artists worked with one of Israel=B9s foremost composer programmers, Didi
Fire, with whom they have composed and arranged the work in MAX MSP which i=
s
used both as a playback system and interpretive instrument, continually
layering and altering the source material. The work is simultaneously a ric=
h
sampling of varied musical cultures, sounds and stories, while at the same
time, through software, a doubling of this process of dispersal as the
material is continually iterated, reconfigured, stretched, mixed, cut-up,
sampled, layered, sounded and iterated - lines of flights that might
surprise us in unveiling an unconscious or unknowing connectedness of
peoples.

At the exhibition, one can record their own song and tell their story to be
added to an ever evolving database.=20