mapping

after three days of prep, the performance. to quote the internet:

“It is a beautiful project and one that brings together three local illustrators and a poet for the festival performance. Despite some last minute technical difficulties - including rain forcing the start time forward by almost two hours, the show delivers with some moments of true beauty and the six busily active artists and live soundtrack make for an absorbing spectacle.” - lucy benson

lucy wrote that for friend sean healy’s skynoise blog and publication back in oz. so not exactly impartial, but on the flip side that should be in print!

from rehearsal to the performance proper. one of the challenges for us of projecting onto a building rather than a cinematic screen is that you don’t have the clear frame for your ‘canvas’, rather you’re just lighting up bits of a facade: type in the void. this gives a problem for making an art-pad the backdrop of your canvas: you don’t want a bright white rectangle somewhere on your building, you want the lit pen-strokes floating in the wider surface. so here we are for one part of the performance proper with our illustrators experimenting with black paper and tipp-ex (correction fluid) type pens.

and here is the kinetxt cut-out submitter app, one button to make the tethered camera shoot and load it into photoshop, and the other to drop the photoshopped image onto for submission to the kinetxt canvas.

i was really happy having created it the night before, a few delays and furrowed brows but essentially a few hours work to make just what i wanted. this was, however, until i saw the artist’s laptop it was to sit on, which didn’t quite look right. “ah… its running tiger. and this is written using leopard obj-c grammar and frameworks. “. que legacy re-write on the morning of performance.

its the day of the performance, and we set kinetxt up in one of the communal rooms of îlot 13 to rehearse.

we do a few ten minute tries, which really give some hope that this could go really well. my favourite memory is seeing one of these start with the outline of an island, and the performance takes the form of a kind of evolving map of utopia. that, and seeing the difference one of the innovations for this performance makes, the ‘cut-outs’ which allow the illustrators to draw characters and tweaked-through-photoshop-whatevers into kinetxt. having pen drawings cut-out and then soft-shadowed with vibrant colours, composited into the kinetxt canvas really opens things visually.

though, of course, it can’t always be rehearsal: kitchen coding called.

the îlot 13 complex has the écurie bar, and what a perfect place. couldn’t resist this shot, seeing the guy reading the hardback comic they had lying there, roses behind and, well, it goes on. too perfect.

one of the ideas of kinetxt is starting off from a blank sheet of paper, story unwritten, and the way I see it one way of increasing the quality or interest in the resultant performance is using the context of the performance as catalyst or reference for whatever emerges. so mapping gave us a great hand in programming us as an outdoor projection in the courtyard of îlot 13, a place with lots of history and spirit. we were projecting on the back walls of one of the blocks, which instantly gives ideas of x-ray views through to the people living there, and the whole complex is a kind of utopia, being a former squat that came to an agreement with the city council, and instead of the standard cycle of demolition and profiteering redevelopment seen world-over, an association was formed to develop the block in the interests of its inhabitants. and what a wonderful job they’ve done, it is quite the urban oasis, both smart and informal.

and so we met there, talked through the history, looked at the wall we were to project on, doodled themes we could explore and so on, captured a little by the photo above.

after arriving at this year’s mapping festival and having the plan-the-week meeting with andrew, its the next day and we’re meeting the artists. mapping have curated seemingly a dream-team for us, which really fits the idea we proposed of emphasising the idea of a ‘band’ coming together to tell a story. we’ve always run kinetxt as a longer-form audience-led event/environment, and for this performance we’ve brought it down to 45 minutes and we’re really hoping to somehow create the equivalent of a band performance, but instead of guitars and drums, we have illustrators, a poet, and a backing setup of me, andrew and james of novak, and lots of laptops with lots of custom code and things hanging off them.

introducing the band -
- heike fiedler, a ‘realtime poet’
- thomas perrodin, an illustrator and comic-strip artist
- themes.ch, aka thomas and mathias, already well versed in live illustration as projections, and photographed above checking out our in-development calligraphy set-up.

and as a footnote, preceeding that meeting with andrew came two tweets from me: “writing lists a week before a performance is always scary” and “realising its much less than a week to the performance: even scarier”

following teatrino were the erasers, which was a great thing to witness but fell short of the ambition i had for it watching the start. they had a great table full of things, all categorised into rows, and it started magnificently with a really nice motion graphic triplehead vj thing that looked like we were in for a real engaging narrative or development, and was all the better when you realised half the content was actually coming from live filming up front, with performers and cameras manipulating print-outs, ink and whatnot into a crisp graphic whole. trouble was, this was so perfect to my eyes that when their next ‘track’ was a real dive aesthetically and musically, and it became clear that it was going to be improvised chaos riffing against well-tread themes without saying anything new or interesting, i felt really let down despite many compelling moments of live action that followed.

its in their artistic statement to have an ‘open loop’ between the back-row vjs and musicians and front-row performers and cameras, but ultimately i think they would really benefit from an outside director coming in and creating a focused show out of their themed chaos.

great performance by teatrino elettrico on the sunday night, in the zoo nightclub innovatively cut-up sideways into an audio-visual theatre.

an audio-visual performance in the truest sense, with all audio and visual generated by teatrino’s contraptions of wheels, nails, whirring electronics and so on, and captured by microphone and camera. its not a unique idea, but they did it really well. what really transformed the performance for me was their embracing of rhythm in the audio - i can only take so much electro-acoustic drone, and this turned drone to music for me - and the triplehead montage of cameras.

who would have known that this year’s fashion is to have your vj name made into a big blingin’ buckle. hi-res meet mxzehn, face-off (or rather, well, what xxx-off would you call that…!)