My Myo Mayhem

63325

Installation, Performance, WERK

depart

Arge Nonntal, Installation, Performance, senselabor

“My Myo Mayhem”: a platonian cave canem kafkaesque coffin break kammerspiel performance installation piece for three performers, myoelectrical stimulation, a chicken called Tesla, video & sound. duration of one cycle ca. 15 minutes imperial chickensouperpowers for the white room-o-botter what happens: groups of 10 people are lead into an anteroom where they are ordered to sit and wait. a strange person behind a counter is giving out questionaries and calling people to the desk in random order. this character is mutating over the duration of the whole piece from casual guy to kafkaesque clerk to lunatic to chicken. every 5 minutes one person is admitted to an adjoining room where an attendant is showing them about. a puppet emperor and his rural adventures are presented on screens while a glimpse into an overhead orifice provides an inverse cage perspective on the confetti chicken. the gloomy atmosphere of the first two rooms is followed by an eery transition to the center stage. There, the “emperor” is performing his private little hatching dance, controlled and hardsynced to the installation soundtrack by a mystical myoelectrical device dangling around his neck. after this shocking galvanic experience, the lounge room is a chill out, big […]

Des Gesprächfightfadens

86907

Misc, Performance, Poetry, Sound, Video, WERK

depart

Arge Nonntal, Performance, senselabor, theater

“Des Gesprächsfightfadens”: word of the wings stutters & flutters a language re-de-re-construction performance for two performers, video backdrop, disillustrative commentary and sound duration: ca. 45 min. DEPART’s germanguage desastroy, a veritabledance lingo-limbo. Dramatized worldplayhem. A staged piece with toadloads of glimmericks fallinglong upwards from heaven’t scene and hertz beforeplay. In DEPART’s “Des Gesprächsfightfadens” there is no dramatic plot per se as in conventional theater, but there are recurring themes and ideas, more like in a musical composition. This work relies heavily on DEPART’s belief in the controlled overflow of sensoric input. The audience is supplied with a sheer mass of wordplay in order to provoke a struggle for perception and conscious processing of input. The more you struggle to get everything, the less interesting the piece will be. But if you are able to relax and let your thoughts wander freely, as in a kind of mediational state of mind, you might be able to grab one meaning here, or one there but go along with the flow of the piece easily. The goal of this endeavour is to create a certain state of consciousness where the seemingly superfluous and absurd action supporting the piece becomes a sort of focus […]

We Only Do (I-III)

93469

Dance, Misc, Performance, WERK

depart

amsterdam, choreography, dance, interactive, Performance, senselabor

“We only do…”: freemote controlemodeled headphonetic puppeteering interactive-stage dance performance for three dancers, computer-generated choreography, motiontracking, sound & video duration: ca. 45 min. eyeconed woeshoeshine, choreogenetics and stagedicing, 3Dancers on their way to form This project saw an evolutionary development from early incarnations as a piece for two dancers with a rather mechanical and robot-like form to a very open and flowing structured piece in the final performance. Central to the piece is the idea of a kinetic system that is addressed by a generative process, which is making decisions according to a set of rules defined beforehand by the choreographer. The stage itself is a blank space monitored by a motiontracking system. The movement of the dancers is translated into sound and video via the motiontracking system EyeCon and tools like PureData, Reaktor and Max/MSP. The dancers would receive command structures like spatial coordinates and specific motion quality or modes of conduct via wireless headphones. Early stages of the piece were not completely determined but still very arbitrary in their decision-making, the later versions already had elaborate regulatory behaviour based on marcov-chain logical structures. When the system was thus established, there were also attempts to introduce some viral behaviour […]

Being Odysseus

70000

Misc, Performance, WERK

depart

cynet art, interactive, Performance, senselabor, theater

“Being Odysseus” – sirens in software, cyclops in code Mellow-dram-o-rama for one performer and interactive motion-tracking stage with reactive audio/video, ca. 60 minutes Odysseus, archetypical browser of land and sea, the i-am-a-wanderer galore, on his deathbedrock, performing the proverbial journey through important memories of his life, captain mnemo’s technological multimediary. Circe, Polyphem, Hades and a peculiar german scholar join in on the cruise of bruises. A reinterpretation of events based on ideas of Homer and Dante. The interactive stage was built using EyeCon, a frame-grabbing motion-tracking software and DEPART’s weapons of choice at that time, NI Reaktor and PureData. The performer was able to roam freely, activating and influencing parts and aspects of the video and soundtrack. Specific zones of action were propelling the story and also changing the stage setup automatically. “Being Odysseus” was DEPART’s first endeavour into realtime motion-tracking, realized in collaboration with Senselabor. Commissioned by Trans-Media-Akademie Hellerau, shown at CynetArt Festival 2004, Dresden, Germany Performer: Georg Hobmeier Video: Leonhard Lass Sound: Gregor Ladenhauf