(photos by cornelia auinger) “I Am Sitting In A Room”: respiratoratorium room ringing resonant ruckus performance for one performer, two loudspeakers, two microphones, on-body-projection and delicate sound balancing duration: ca. 45 min. original composition by Alvin Lucier (1970) who’s talking when and where, hip or square, what moves the air ? In the second incantation of the Reverb.On Series in 2008, DEPART and Richard Eigner devoted themselves to the piece „I Am Sitting In A Room“ by Alvin Lucier. This idiosyncratic electroacoustic composition summons a physical component of compact spaces, their inherent resonance. A short text, which is selfreferential and recursive both on the room situation and itself, is spoken into a microphone, recorded and fed back into the room very closemouthed in a kind of acoustical mantra until the rooms own resonant frequency is overdubbing the initial signal beyond recognition. Richard Eigner and Gregor Ladenhauf were responsible for the acoustic implementation of this concept that was first realised in 1969 by American composer Alvin Lucier (*1931). Together with his DEPARTner Leonhard Lass, who is responsible for the visual translation of the piece, performer Gregor Ladenhauf adds to the piece as voice and screen at the same time. A speaker […]
Read More ›
“Rain Are In Clouds”: wirr singing and dancing in the brain 10 track A/V album for sound and realtime 3D proce55ing tbr 2009 where we come from there is always music in the eye “while I think, you make my heart sync.” The videos on this album are a combination of eletronic sound and abstract 3D shapes generated in realtime via the software processing (www.processing.org). The musical data is processed and transformed into shapes and movements, providing the viewer with the artists vision of what sound could look like if it was not merely air that is moving around us. The basic idea for each of the provided videos was to create “narratives” that would, albeit rather constructed and abstract, create an organic feel and a little bit of a story. Parts of the sound or also the musical composition are taken into account as “actors” on the visual stage. Playing and interacting with each other, they not only accompany but impersonate the sounds. What makes DEPART special is the combination of a visual and a sound artist working together really closely. In this way, not only the visual artist is creating a world of graphics but both are trying […]
Read More ›
Iminami (by the Spycollective) is a multiroom performance installation. Drained brains swash in narrative tsunamis exhaling from the metamyth of the White Woman. Audience-swarms with spread waterwings on the tideway from mother to smother get carried away by drowned voices. This is fishy, oh buoy. Supported by Steim (Amsterdam), SARC (belfast) and ARGE Nonntal (Salzburg) Iminami Trailer
Read More ›
“Vexations”: on & on & on, till the beak of yawn play a loophole into your headpeace performance for two piano players, projected video and stream of consciousness writing. original composition (1893) by Erik Satie. duration ca. 1200 min. our resume: Vexations is a challenge, a practical joke and a timemachine. eriksatieeriksatieeriksatieeriksatieeriksatieeriksatieeriksatieeriksatieeriksatieeriksatieeriksatieeriksatie “Je m’appelle Erik Satie comme tout le monde.” we perform satie. wir verformen satie. we do it for us. wir tun es für uns. we do it for you. wir tun es für euch. we do it because it is not important to be done. wir tun es weil es nicht wichtig ist dass es getan wird. we do it because we would like to do it. wir tun es weil wir es gerne tun möchten. we are two people playing piano and one computing and showing the difference. wir sind zwei, die klavier spielen und einer, der die differenz berechnet und zeigt. we will play it note for note. wir werden es note für note spielen. you will hear it note for note. ihr werdet es note für note hören. afterwards nothing will be the same. danach wird das nichts sein wie es war. Short piano piece […]
Read More ›
“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 […]
Read More ›
“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 […]
Read More ›
“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 […]
Read More ›
“PETARD”: our synapsisyntactical dewelloperawe live A/V performance for synced fragmented audio & video, mostly improvised live duration: variable DEPART used patched reaktors and gems to craft and drill shimmering synthaestheoretic momentals in reeltime and space out. Twitching sound fragments and video snippets like twisted twins, DEPART’s first realtime audiovisual performance was a demanding but mandatory experience. intriguing combinations of flip-floppy hazardous movements in frequency and perspective, audiences were shocked and awed by the sheer force of what Kandinsky only could paint about in still images: audiovisual sculptures, proliferated, processed and projected in realtime. PETARD was an alias used from 2003-2008. Various live performances including: Microsope Sessions , Dresden, Germany Basics Festival 2004, Salzburg, Austria Animac Festival 2004, Lleida, Spain Cimatics Festival 2004, Bruxelles, Belgium de-bug review evading
Read More ›
“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
Read More ›
