audiovisual performance for noise machine, realtime audio and video

Within POST ELETTRONICA
A project curated by Valentina Gensini and Letizia Renzini

In tribute to John Cage, the project POST ELETTRONICA investigates territories of “post-electronic” experimentation revealing Cage’s contemporary inheritance and presenting artists who share a dramatic and gestural use of new technologies. Hybrid works that combine music, video, performance, sculpture, sound, noise become vocabularies of a composite language in which the management of advanced software is combined with the artifact in an attempt to dissolve the conceptual approach towards the involvement of the viewer.

Machines made of gears and cranks are manipulated to produce a sound construction at the crossroads of acoustics and electronics. Submerged in surround sound, the audience discovers the interaction between mechanical and synthetic sound. With specifically tailored programming, digital processing are enlarging the sound palette of the machines.

La Chambre des Machines (The Mechanical Room) stems from a desire to return to the physical world in an environment of digital creation. The project also refers back to the intonarumoris, sound machines built by Italian futurists at the beginning of the 20th century. These machines contained mysterious mechanisms, just as computers do today.

Unclassifiable, Nicolas Bernier is joyfully flowing between musique concrète, video art, installation and performance. His vividness quickly brought him international recognition, cumulating distinctions like at Prix Ars Electronica (Austria, 2009, 2011), Visionaria Festival (Italia, 2004, 2005) and Chicago Motion Graphic Festival (USA, 2004) to name a few. In the midst of this eclecticism, his artistic concerns remain constant: the balance between the cerebral and the sensual, and between organic sound sources and digital processing.

Martin Messier is a composer, a performer and a video artist. His curiosity for graphic arts has brought him to explore the relationship between sound and image to create audio performance, live electronics, installation, videomusic, music for dance and theatre. His work has been broadcast in national and international festivals including Mutek (Canada), Cartes Flux Festival (Finland), Transmediale (Berlin) et Sonar (Barcelone,Chicago).

music, performance and concept: Nicolas Bernier + Martin Messier
video footage: Foumalade.org
intonarumoris (noise machines): Alexandre Landry
production 2010, Perte de signal
A special thanks to Fondazione Il Fiore, Florence