into the studio with chris allen for a day’s shoot of chase & status vocalists. i’m pulling together the visuals for the chase & status autumn tour for the light surgeons. this was the first step: film four vocalists over seven tracks in one day. kano up first, though without the against all odds afro.
seeing myself in print was definitely a theme for this trip: documenting your festival in really well produced books is something seemingly intrinsic to brasil, and so interest turned to delight when i was handed the 2008 annual from rio de janeiro’s multiplicidade and saw pages upon pages devoted to the d-fuse performance that took me there.
reservations about file apart, its damn nice seeing yourself in print. their catalogue is truly something to behold.
i was also interviewed by mtv before my performance, talking briefly about rbn_esc and some of the ideas of live cinema. that hasn’t found its way to the internet as far as i can see, although somebody does seem to have uploaded some filmed excerpts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71MDtdPm3bY&feature=related
the file exhibition had some nice pieces. i would link to them, but the file website is impenetrable (in marked contrast to their amazing catalogue, to follow…).
my favourite was a simple sound installation executed flawlessly. as you walked down a sterile glass corridor, you triggered a sonic world crossing the border at tijuana via a jumble of perspex stalks hanging in your way with slightly/suitably sinister looking sensors at their tips.
› nina waisman; with pd programming by marius schebella / between bodies (tijuana) / united states
pictured is something that had a little trick that transformed the whole thing. you trigger a game of life simulation spreading across the whole table by waving your hand over some part of it, which the artist’s statement elaborates on. but the magic was the oh-so-very-digital lights were sitting atop electro-mechanical relays, which give a really satisfying click as they turn the turn the led on or off, which imbued the ‘life’ in the installation a visceral, swarming, physicality.
› leo nuñez / game of life /argentina
i was also happy to finally see the mechanical recreation of arcade game world of mario in the flesh. the idea is nicer than the reality, but that doesn’t stop there be real wonder in pressing the NES game pad and seeing and hearing a meccano-like contraption scissor mario in the air, rather than it just happening as pixels on a screen.
› keith lam / moving mario / china
finally, as d-fuse, we stopped in our tracks when we saw a triple-head montage of an abstracted city passing by: not a million miles away from a description of particle. good that it was a) really well done and b) exploring a completely different, almost brutal, aesthetic.
› marina chernikova / urban surfing moscow / netherland
as it happened, the pretty reknown FILE festival was the following week, and we were in são paulo already. so an application for rbn_esc from me later, and some d-fusing from mike, and we’re staying on for particle’s second outing and rbn_esc’s debut outside of europe (somehow, thats true).
it was a weird experience though. for all of the festival’s reputation and a hotel bursting with artists, it was a strangely empty experience. i’m happy to support festivals without proper funding, and itaú cultural who brought us over deserve a great deal of respect for allowing to perform particle again and dealing with the flights. i’m not so happy doing that and finding the festival is all facade, with no real reason to be there as an artist beyond getting the tick-box kudos on your cv, and seemingly no concern for building an experience for the audience either.
nice to cross paths with motomichi again, pictured, who participated in the avit vj festival in brighton, 2003. his performance at file hypersonica was a highlight for me, a vj set of his black/red/white trademark animation that never lagged, that was constantly moving forward.
…but all that fades away against the rift of paraisópolis and morumbi. o m g. to see this was why we’d hired the helicopter. just unreal.
urban conditions…? i would just stick this on a cinema screen for an hour and let people deal with thinking it through.
lots of urban visual goodness from the air in são paulo… great concrete vistas, modernism old and new…
and then there we were. above the city, doors removed, pointing cameras wherever we could.
for the record, this is one of the more stress-full things i’ve done: knowing the cost per minute, not having a tripod fitting let alone the gyro stabilised camera of the newscopters, being blown around by the tremendous headwind, barely being able to see the screen in the glare, everything going too quick, and only having a car seatbelt type affair holding me in as i leant out. but it was amazing. just need to raise the money to hire a full HD filming equipped ‘copter: having experienced the diy version and then looked at the real deal in its hanger, i’d say worth every penny. you just need something to justify it….
são paulo is an interesting city for a number of reasons. statistically, its a big hitter in the d-fuse world of urban conditions: the first or second most populous metropolitan area in the americas with a cool 21 million, and with the rich escaping the traffic via the largest helicopter fleet in the world. and so, mulling on that, we found ourselves at the heliport…
we’re such poseurs. the problem with loosing all the dvd-decks, v4 mixers and whatnot in favour of two laptops and a mini crossfader box, is that your stage setup looks somewhat less impressive. so seeing the shadows of the monitors on the mesh screen, it didn’t take long before somebody was recreating the old look with a bunch of cables…
