Performances

Lillevan and Atau will perform three short audiovisual pieces looking at the body as a source of sound, image, and corporeal expression. A sensor system detects the electromyogram (EMG) signal, electrical impulses from the nervous system causing muscle tension, and renders a musical instrument the performer’s own body, allowing him to articulate sound through concentrated gesture. Live image manipulation parallels this, situating the performer in an immersive sound/image space. Le Loup: A single short recorded sample of howling wolves are stretched and transposed, creating a continuous growling. Lifting: Whistling oscillators are modulated in frequency and amplitude, recalling the classical Theremin. Myogram: A direct sonification of muscle activity where we hear the neuron impulses of muscle exertion as data. Throughout the piece, the raw data is first heard, then filtered, then excite resonators and filters. This piece was created in musical collaboration with Miguel Ortiz. After meeting at Tacheles in Berlin 25 years ago, this performance is Atau and Lillevan’s first collaboration. The groundwork was laid in London in 2015 when Lillevan performed with Adam Parkinson in the Sonics Immersive Media Labs (SIML) at Goldsmiths.

Lillevan is an animation, video and media artist. He is perhaps best known as founding member of the visual / music group Rechenzentrum (1997-2008).Lillevan has performed and collaborated with many artists from a wide array of genres, from opera to installation, from minimal electronic experimentalism to dance and classical music; performed and exhibited all over the globe, and at all the major media festivals.

www.lillevan.com

Atau Tanaka conducts research in embodied musical interaction. This work takes place at the intersection of Human Computer Interaction and gestural computer music performance. He studies our encounters with sound, be they in music or in the everyday, as a form of phenomenological experience. This includes the use of physiological sensing technologies, notably muscle tension in the electromyogram signal, and machine learning analysis of this complex, organic data. At the other extreme, he studies user experience through ethnographic methods of participatory design where activities of workshopping, scenario building, and structured brainstorming lead an understanding of a mediums affordances in bottom-up, emergent ways. Atau has previously been Artistic Ambassador at Apple, researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, and professor and guest professor in Japan, France, and northeast England. His work has been supported by the European Research Council (ERC), Horizon2020, and both science and humanities sections of Research Councils UK (RCUK).

Germination is an original audiovisual work that brings together the aesthetic and technical researches of Alex Augier and Alba G. Corral to converge towards a coherent transversal artistic proposal, emphasizing what appears to be an original and specific path to hypermedia. Sound, image, space and time merge in a poetic, dreamlike and organic hypermedia, deployed in space, time of performance and under the gestures of the two performers. The conception of this hypermedia implies that one dimension does not take precedence over the other but is completed and enriched. The proposal puts aside achievements where the sound or image is used in their aspects of illustrations, in their informative or narrative functions. The project also integrates the issue of correspondence with the actions of the performers, the stakeholder of the work.

Alba G. Corral is a Visual Artist and creative coder based in Barcelona. With a background in computer engineering, Corral has been creating generative art using software and coding for the past decade. Her practice spans across live performance, video, digital media and installation, exploring abstract narratives and expressing sensitivity and taste for colour. By combining generative systems with improvised drawing techniques, her digital language becomes organic, creating mesmerising digital landscapes. Corral is known for her stunning live audio-visual performances where she integrates real-time coding and drawing in collaboration with musicians. . Her works has been exhibited at festivals and events in Europe, México, Japan & EEUU.

Ventriloquy II

Bryan’s work uses interactive machine learning techniques to explore the relationships between sound and image. As a demonstration of the Immersive Pipeline, Bryan will present a work for six projectors and surround sound that explores our perception of cross modal ventriloquism. The audio and visual elements are generated simultaneously with parameters mapped to the performer’s position in 3D space using a neural network performing regression analysis. This allows for the expressive control of both sound and visuals in real time. The audio and visuals in this work are given equal importance with neither one merely supporting the other. Furthermore, there is a fundamental dependency between the audio and visual elements, neither one could exist in isolation and still form a coherent artistic statement. These elements collide in the audience’s perception to become more than the sum of their parts.

https://vimeo.com/bryandunphy

Naut Humon is the Founder and Artistic Director of International Creative Operations for Recombinant Media Labs (RML) whose spatial AV media project the RML- CineChamber propagates a panoramic performance production platform for image and sound surround residencies & festival formats. During the 90’s thru the main 2000’s Naut was also curating artist content for Asphodel Records in New York and SF and for select portions of the annual ARS Electronica Festival in Austria where he also was the US coordinator of their Digital Music and Sound Art jury category for ten years. Having performed in the eighties with the avant- garde music group Rhythm & Noise, he later formed the Surround Traffic Control network; the aural optic incubator that gave birth to today's CineChamber apparatus that recently returned from overseas to California in 2016 / 17 with the annual autumn RecombinantFestival.com.

'Captured in the data -bloodstream of our auraloptical organs arrives the meticulous weavings of Tokyo born Masako Tanaka, a visionary panoramic pioneer of the CineChamber's ten channel format . The animated fibers that she threads together feed a formation fabric of chaotic complexity and gravitational mass that pervade every surface of RML's screen arena. The marvel and full measure of her spatial detailings reference what an insect with multiple eyes might experience as these clouds of granulation organisms of thousands of cinematic fragments flock and swarm with wild and unpredictable behaviors. One can view these immersive molecular mappings over many repeated showings and witness new unforeseen elements each and every time. Masa's optically insistent continuum depicts a transformational habitat of time shifted frames through rotating layers of a visual kind of energy - the room is alive, impulsive, off axis, always breathing, as the floodgates of image offsprings and particle fibrillations subdivide and spill forth. Masako Tanaka also worked as the main video production head for the Multiple Otomo Project on the Asphodel Label where she was the primary editor, assembler and visual composition coordinator & adjuster. 13 Markus Popp's sound nuggets which form the sonic underpinning for Masako Tanaka's video personifications stem from Markus's Oval Commers audio file archives from the early 2000's era. Performed and released under the name Oval, Popp's music has been at the forefront of experimental electronica since the early '90s. Originally a three-piece , the Oval group became known as propagators of the so-called 'glitch' movement; disdaining conventional electronic instruments, their early albums were composed through the creative abuse of compact disc players. Deliberately mutilated discs were used to create a remarkable range of fragmentary sounds, which would then be painstakingly processed, compiled and assembled into musical pieces with a strange allure all of their own. As Markus moved on with Oval alone he adopted the Apple Powerbook to run his specially commissioned software which has been used to create a series of interactive 'installation objects' for public spaces. On the hard drive of his Powerbook, Popp had created an archive consisting of tens of thousands of tiny sound fragments which Masa dipped into a smaller portion of to re- compile from to utilize a longer reoccurring & evolving musical soundtrack.'

Immersive Pipeline is a research project led by Atau Tanaka initially funded for a period of 6 months by the AHRC/EPSRC Research and Partnership Development call for the Next Generation of Immersive Experiences with artist curator Dr. Blanca Regina and software developer Pierre Tardif.