OSTINATO THEME
EXPECTATION TRACK
THE BRAIN DREAM
CIVILISATION SONG
Ostinato – Internet Songs is the first phase of a research on improv scores, looping pedals, diabolical machines, a flattening of the hierarchy of meaning in the news, and the Internet. Through a personal collection/archive of Yahoo! News titles such as She beats the world record by giving birth to ten babies, This artist living in Paris is the son of Ben Laden or Tumult in the prison I use these « objets trouvés » as source material to generate different performance, visual and sound formats. Coming from a performance and video art background, I am interested in the gap between the presence of an actual body and its representation, the relationship between face and surface. I use source material that reveals social stereotypes and examine their presence in the body. The Yahoo! news feed is for me a kind of immersive material, an interface that displays addictive content, a feed that offers low visibility of sources. A contemporary way of consuming news.
In music, an ostinato is a motif or phrase that is constantly repeated in the same musical voice. Here also refers to the hypnotic and neurotic qualities of the contemporary Internet news feed. Can we hack the flat and numbing stream of information?
With the support of the TAKE HEART Research Grant from the Fonds Darstellende Künste of Germany, I have been able to experiment with several mediums such as sound art, text-based improvisation, movement research and web-interactive art work. This webpage presents a selection of four experiments. During the research I have collaborated with sound artist FiFi to create several tracks that will be used in the future dance piece based on this research. From these tracks I have produced the video EXPECTATION TRACK that is a vision of a scene for the dance piece. With CIVILISATION SONG, I have collaborated with creative coder Manus Nijhoff who helped me bring to life my vision for an interactive-art piece. This interactive work uses visuals from the Yahoo News and the track INTERNET VIOLENCE created with FiFi. THE BRAIN DREAM is a video presenting a text produced after spending long hours improvising with the Yahoo News titles material. The OSTINATO THEME is a diaporama presenting the selection of Yahoo News I have been working with in the last months.