[spectre] Digicult Videoscenings - Plateaux Festival 2009

[Redazione Digicult]

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