Ultimate: Multimedia performance by Sophie Clements and Peter Schwalm

I compiled a few pieces of video from the recent performance by Sophie Clements and Peter Schwalm, at the Plaza Plus art festival in Eindhoven (I wrote about it yesterday). The whole performance (± 40min) would be too difficult to both record and then place here, so I picked one short piece from every part they played. I liked the second section (with the waves) and the last one, with the buildings and frames. This last one strongly reminded me aman_geld , with the same intent to mix and remix the ‘reality’. Sophie’s main presentation at the festival [link here] was again about similar motive, of revealing the surreal in a mundane everyday reality.

Plaza Plus: Performance by Sophie Clements & Co

Plaza Plus festival ended for us with an excellent performance, by the same Sophie Clements we listened in the first day, who presented a wonderful audio-visual show together with J. Peter Schwalm and a couple of other musician (drums and bass). It was interesting to see how visual flow was also ‘performed alive’, and weaved into the music; a very different experience compared to the usual film.

Sophie Clements’ Evensong

A couple of stills from the video-installation by Sophie Clements, UK-based video-artist, who also presented some of her earlier works during the opening talk at the Plaza Plus festival in Eindhoven. Static images do not convey the whole magic of the video flow, and of course they also miss the sounds, so it is advised to look at least at the video of this project, at her web-site.

There was also a whole room at the Plaza Futura (nicely called ‘Sophie’s room’) presenting a sort of ‘making-of’ of the project, but which also a piece of art itself. I liked the way how the videos have been were displayed, projected at the pieces of glass hanging in a space. It was creating almost a ghost-like feeling, with something 3D-ish moving alive in the air.

Ghost Piano

A very interesting performance (a premier, in fact), by a German musician Volker Bertelman (better known as Hauschka), and a video artist Jeff Desom from Luxemburg. The technique they used is quite old, and was employed already in the Renaissance times to evoke the ’spirits’ and ‘ghosts’ (see the pic below):

The ghost in this case was Hauschka, who was behind the curtain but whose image was projected at the piano standing on the scene. But there was another projection, of the Desom’s movie, where piano was flashing, burning, soaked in rain, and again inflamed etc., etc. Together with an experimental music by Hauschka it all created a multipayered, polyphonic yet very intimate show, and quite an experience for the audience. This video is about a preparation of the show, not the show itself, and I am still waiting when the show will be placed somewhere on the web.

Plaza Plus

Today is an opening of Plaza Plus, a new art festival in Eindhoven (‘new’ here has a double meaning, both as in ‘new art’ and as a new beginning for Plaza Futura cinema that hosts the event). Judging by the program, these should be very interesting evening, and I am looking forward to enjoying those shows and performances we will manages to attend.

Interactive Installation in the Rockefeller Center

The Third & The Seventh, by Alex Roman

Amazingly beautiful; this is not the full piece, but a shorter version; the full work can be found at his Vimeo

History in the Making (of Transformations)

A short excerpt of the recent performance by Keren Cytter (History in the Making or the Secret Diaries of Linda Schultz), made in collaboration with her theatre company D.I.E. Now (Dance International Europe) and presented at the Tate Modern in London. There are few interesting and intertwining motifs here: on a surface it’s about gender/transformation, but deeper it’s about personal (and social) changes in general.

Fun The( )ry Applied

A truly interactive (and funny) installation in in Stockholm, Sweden where students changed stairs into a ‘living piano’ (thus rapidly and dramatically changing behavior – 66% more people took the stairs, and not the elevator at that day).

ps: Found it via Youchin’s blog.

Wine Barrel Meeting