(land)moves

(land)moves is a project developed in collaboration with Marco Liuni (music) e Bruno Zamborlin (gesture analysis). It consists of an interactive system which relates user’s gestures to the evolving landscape they have in front.
 
The system generates a representation of an artificial planet where the experience of time is set by cycles of days and nights. The morphology of the land vary according to the qualities of user’s movements. These firstly relates to a reactive flock of polygons which flies over the land.
 
Sounds are associated to visual events in order to create a symbolic yet surrealistic meaning. Twittering metallic polygons defies gravity while seismic evolutions shape the land. Wind blows constantly on this world as the guitar restitutes the flavor this electric landscape.
 
The explicit influence that movements have on the morphology of the territory is intended as a suggestion of the direct link human beings have with their environment.
 
 
Exhibitions
New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) 2011, Oslo (Paper and demo)
Audiovisiva, Milan

Geo – GP & DP

Geo @ Acces(s), Pau	Geo @ Acces(s), Pau	Geo @ Acces(s), Pau	Geo @ Medionauta, Milan	Geo @ Medionauta, Milan
Geo @ Medionauta, Milan	Geo @ Medionauta, Milan	Geo @ Le Placard, Milan	Geo @ Le Placard, Milan	Geo @ Le Placard, Milan
Geo @ Le Placard, Milan	Geo @ Le Placard, Milan	Geo @ Le Placard, Milan	Geo @ Mal au Pixel, Paris

Audiovisual Concerts by Giorgio Partesana and Duncan Pinhas
 
In between science and contemplation, analytical and synesthetic approach, Geo aims to give a non-exhaustive, immersive, meditative, audiovisual representation of three ecospheres of the planet, namely hydrosphere, lithosphere and atmosphere.
 
Geo is planned as a trilogy which chapters are drafted to confront matters in their evolving natural states with some of the interactions mankind have with them, so that natural forces are confronted to mastering work employed by mankind.
 
The concerts are drafted as an exploration of micro and macro landscapes created with matters recorded in specific environments. The destination of the journey is an imaginary land where natural and artificial geometries, symbols of our habitats merge into hybrid patterns.
 
Time-based manipulation and amplification of recorded matters evokes a physical sensations allowing abstract geometries to acquire a personal meaning. The project, will to stimulate a reflection about the environment that we inhabit, alternating lulling to uncomfortable moments.
 
 

Geo, Opus II – Solid Matters
 

Geo, Opus II – Solid Matters [Stills]

Geo, Opus II – Solid Matters [Stills]	Geo, Opus II – Solid Matters [Stills]	Geo, Opus II – Solid Matters [Stills]	Geo, Opus II – Solid Matters [Stills]	Geo, Opus II – Solid Matters [Stills]
Geo, Opus II – Solid Matters [Stills]	Geo, Opus II – Solid Matters [Stills]	Geo, Opus II – Solid Matters [Stills]	Geo, Opus II – Solid Matters [Stills]	Geo, Opus II – Solid Matters [Stills]
Geo, Opus II – Solid Matters [Stills]	Geo, Opus II – Solid Matters [Stills]	Geo, Opus II – Solid Matters [Stills]	Geo, Opus II – Solid Matters [Stills]

This, most recent, second opus focuses on solid matters such as stone and concrete, on which cutting and arranging movements are opposed to aging and breaking.
 

Here is the Full Length Demo.
 
Concerts (selection)
 
Nov 10 – Festival Access, Pau (Residence+Concert)
Oct 10 – Festival Tec Art Eco, Como
May 10 – Podere Casetta, Ravenna
May 10 – Medionauta, Milan
May 10 – Festival Cronosfera, Turin
May 10 – Festival Vision’R, Paris
Mar 10 – Soirée IRL Performance, Paris

Geo, (Study for) Opus I – Liquid Traces
 

Geo, Opus I – Liquid Traces [Stills]

Geo, Opus I – Liquid Traces	Geo, Opus I – Liquid Traces	Geo, Opus I – Liquid Traces	Geo, Opus I – Liquid Traces	Geo, Opus I – Liquid Traces
Geo, Opus I – Liquid Traces	Geo, Opus I – Liquid Traces	Geo, Opus I – Liquid Traces	Geo, Opus I – Liquid Traces	Geo, Opus I – Liquid Traces
Geo, Opus I – Liquid Traces	Geo, Opus I – Liquid Traces

This preliminary work (yet to be finalized) is focused on liquid matters which fluidity suggests, in some of its forms, the ever mutating flow of things as well as the traces these flow leave.
 
Concerts (selection)
 
Jun 07 – Festival ASC, Turin 
Apr 07 – Mal au Pixel 2007, Paris
Apr 07 – Galerie Librairie En Marge, Paris
Oct 06 – Festival Le Placard, Milan
Mar 06 – Apt au 21e et. de la tour Boucry, Paris
Mar 06 – Villa Mais D’Ici, Auberviliers (Paris)

Video for Jazzy Tourism by Kisk (Lopazz vs Eddie Zarook Remix), commissioned by Apparel Music for its first release.
 
The footage, shot on the smoothly sliding tramway of Porto, required almost no post production, just some editing for synchronizing events… which makes the difference from Michel Gondry’s masterpiece for Star Guitar by The Chemical Brothers (to which this video gives a little tribute).

The immersive communication project created a benchmark document of current and next generation developments in the area of immersive communication, gesture recognition and other related, tangible user interfaces. It analysed these developments with a focus on usability, intuitiveness and naturalness of user interaction, and developed a set of recommendations about the use of gesture recognition interfaces.
 
Experientia then imagined possible applications of gesture interface technology, creating a portfolio of concepts modelled around user needs in the areas of communication, organisation and entertainment.

Composer Sami Klemola asked me to contribute in the development of Sculpt!, an interactive sound installation presented at the Kunsthalle Art Gallery during Siba Fest organized by Sibelius Academy. Sami worked on the music while I developed the camera motion tracking and then we had fun with the mapping.
 
In an empty white room people could walk, pose and move to shape the sound they hear. The feeling of “sculpting” is emphasized by remodelling the sound’s frequencies spectrum.

Descritpion

Link is a ludic interactive artwork entwining physical and virtual experiences. It consists of three parts: the Creation Desk, the Playground and the Eden of the Avatars.
 
At the Creation Desk the participant creates an avatar, a visual representation of himself, modeling it with the voice. The sample is recorded and will be used as raw material to generate a personal soundscape.
 
In the Playground, a maximum of three people can play together through (and with) their avatars. Modulating their respective distances the avatars will link and unlink themselves, generating a personal soundscape according to their movements. Everyone can hear others voices.
 
The Eden of the Avatars is an extension of the physical experience. It is a virtual world populated by the avatars of former participants. Here they survive for a limited period of time and, moving as their owners moved, evolve in a virtual dynamic network. The Eden of the Avatars is only visual, the sound experience being personal, subjective and limited to the physical experience.
 
 

Aesthetics of Interactivity

Link – Interactive Experience

The experience is immersive but social and unbounded. Participants are immersed in the light of the projection of their avatars which follow them like shadows and interact with their movements.
 
Users wear wireless headphones (equipped with a light motion capture device) which allows them to move freely modulating their own soundscape (based on their vocal sample) and to interact with the others sending and receiving sounds particles.
 
The experience can be personal while opened to the external world, audio and visual elements, beside glances and smiles, are exchanged in between participants.

Exhibitions
Portes Ouvertes de l’Ecole Nationale Superieure de Beaux Arts de Paris.
Enactive 07, Grenoble.

n+i

I took care of the video design starting from Emmanuel Lavergne’s photographies and Lucas Zanotto gently granted us his music piece. The video has been produced by Espace Pier Paolo Pasolini, Valenciennes (France).
 
 

Synopsis
The incursion within matter leads to outline its internal geometrical dance. Tension caused by the magnetic charge of particles compose figures which soon come undone, in a continuous waltz of fusion and fission. The borders are just an illusion, frontiers are made by links.
 
 

Festivals
Curtas Vila do Conde, Portugal
IceBox02, Bell-Roberts Cube Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
Paysages Electroniques, Lille, France
International Short Film Festival, Lille, France
Experimental Film Tuškanac, Zagreb, Croatia
International Film Festival Carbunari, Baia Mare, Romania. (Jury Awards)
Artronica. Bogotà. Colombia

Shot by Cyril Teste

The journalistic image fill the news on television and paper. This redundant images, once picked up by the brain, lurks somewhere between consciousness and subconscious, between memory and experience. Their realness loses its meaning to attain a properpictorial dimension.
 
As layers laid upon by the time, the images left by the everyday life shuffle in an informational magma, that take after the notion of non-image. Everything is in it but nothing is distinguishable.
 
The collective memory, explored in its depth, swing between the swarming of composed and decomposed forms, the slow dissolution and the perceivable emergence of a form over the others. The boiling informational liquid dissolves into shapeless mental images.
 
 
Critics
« Shot clings to the anatomy and the radiography of the social body though photography, the black box of the last fifty years. Endlessly repeated, the cut and paste deflects the signals emitted by the half-length photographed presenter. A poetic scenic installation intended to disenchant of media hypnosis, to bring to life again the very last images of the history. »
Libération, 23rd July 2004

Theme of the piece

Zeurope by Natacha Kantor

Zeurope relies on a myth, the one of the kidnapping of Europa by Zeus. Europa, the ancient texts reveal, was a young Phoenician princess by whom the big Zeus was interested. Zeus, metamorphosed in a bull, both to hide himself from his jealous wife Hera and not to scare the young maiden, kidnapped and brought her, on his bull-like back, through the Aegean See to Crete. It’s where, under a platan, that the act was consumed.
 
Among other divine honours, Zues willed that Europa, after her death gave her name at the continent, where she was not born.
 
 

Video stage
The video system is circular, but the perception of the spectators is limited and related to their position. As the metopes in Greek temples, the screen beneath the fronton, where the action has place, visualize the iconic data underlining the narrated theme.
 
Sixteen screens are arranged by four colors. Red for earth : the labyrinth and the hole in the ground. Green for tree : metamorphosis and evolution. Blue for voyage : from Tyr to Gortyn, and through killed time. Gray for the crown : floral and royal. The inner movements of the images suggest circularity and continuity of the subjects. Their concatenation is characterized by slow metamorphosis. Screens are employed as light sources. They function as thermometers transposing the stage temperature.

Everyday the city starts its cycle. I’m part of it, circulating from an organ to another. My camera my eyes, I observe. People are there as they have always been there.
 
In the veins of the urban organism where the population mixes up, the vast human catalogue unfolds, and identities confronts voluntarily or not.