audio-visual performance
terrains vagues wandering is an audiovisual performance with live electric cello, speech and sound samples, performative drawing augmented with digital effects and the manipulation of a bonobo toy. The project is based on the collection of tweets sharing common hashtags. It illustrates the harmful effects of spread of ideas in society. On these information wastelands, the performance offers an audiovisual poetry made of despaired cello laments and performative drawings about the dystopian social pressure. The bonobo toy shares the graphics scene, sacrifices its fragile innocence of endangered species and mirrors our own vulnerability.
The narration is based on the collection of shared hashtags in tweets leading to #stateofemergency. The performance starts with flashes of social climbers combined with advertising or counseling speech samples. It then traverses conflicts and wars to end up in a surveillance society controlled by the state of emergency. The noisy information space from which the tweets were extracted is represented visually by mixed moiré images from the media. It is also evoked by the noisy loops of microsamples extracted from corporate speech or mainstream music collected from the hashtags.
audio-visual performance — duration 32′
sound/graphics: Porphyrograph / interaction: pure data
downloadable video trailer for terrains vagues wandering (mp4) (3’28)
downloadable portfolio for terrains vagues wandering (pdf) (en)
Reference: Carney, Phil, and Vince A. Miller. Vague spaces. In Jansson, André, and Amanda Lagerkvist, eds. Strange spaces: Explorations into mediated obscurity, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. (2009): 33-56.
