Audiovisual performance for a web documentary

Emergencia Quadrante is a series of ten web documentaries created by Tatiana Travisani, Deco Zido and Luis Miguel Jaramillo. For every episode they invite audiovisual artists from all over the world who get the chance to present their work and talk about their relationship with the media they use and art in general. When they invited us to showcase an audiovisual performance, we produced a 15 minutes long immersive journey playing with the auditive and visual perception of the observer.

For the visual part of our work we decided to create a video projection mapping on a flat surface (a plain wall) in their studio and create the illusion of depth and height by outlining the shapes of our -virtual- 3D structure with black adhesive tape. This is a technique that has been used a lot by visual artists in the past and can be done with paint, tape or even pen markers. The idea behind it is that by creating physical outlines (and thus enhancing contrast) it is easier for the observer to accept the structure as real. Without any projection the structure will look like a two-dimensional abstract print without any depth but once light, textures and movement are added via projection, human depth cues are being activated and the form comes to life. This way one can trick observers into the illusion of the structure being real and three-dimensional.

It wouldn't be enough just to include the black line pattern as top layer in the video output, which has to be done anyway in order to prevent light from being incidentally projected onto the taped outlines. Since projectors usually are not built to produce rich black (the total absence of light) they will hardly reach the visual contrast of lines made of paint or tape. It's easy to see this problem in action by projecting a black image on a white wall. Depending on the projector model, working hours of the bulb, the whiteness of the wall and myriads of other variables the output will appear to be somewhere between dark and light gray.

In addition to the visuals we created an audio arrangement which consisted of 3 main themes. Those themes were mainly created from scratch during our preparation of the performance. As part of the live-concept some of the synthesizer-instruments were played in realtime during the show using midi controllers and keyboards. The remaining sound-channels and effects were predefined in a timeline to give the performance a consistent layout.

 
Further to our performance we had the chance to DJ during an event of our friends from Emergencia Quadrante. We also reactivated our visual installation for this night. The performance-video will soon be available from the website of Emergencia Quadrante. We will provide the URL shortly.