lost blog: amazing hardcore cgi and digital analog live performances at tate modern

the Ryoichi Kurokawa perfromance was by far the bes! this guy knows how to entertain the audeince. the other acts fell into the visual arts pit fall of playing on one idea for a painfully long 40 minutes!!

thanks to our friends at optronica for bring him to the uk! i first saw his work screened in tokyo a few years back and it was a real pleasure to see him live!!

read offocial blurb below!

Synthesis
Ryoichi Kurokawa, Toshimaru Nakamura & Billy Roisz, Sachiko M with Benedict Drew

Ryoichi Kurokawa
Performance, Optronica Festival, National Film Theatre, London, 2006
© The artist

Monday 28 May 2007, 21.00–23.00

Sachiko M with Benedict Drew
AVVA - Toshimaru Nakamura and Billy Roisz
Ryoichi Kurokawa

Presenting live audio-visual performances from Japan, Austria and the UK, this programme highlights artists who are exploring the use of feedback, decay, assemblage and kinetics. Central to the notion of synthesis, are artistic practices that make use of electronic, analogue and self-built instruments; tools, techniques and software for the real-time creation, improvisation and manipulation of both sound and image.

While the avant-garde movements of the modern period idealized the machine, mechanical dysfunction is now often a focus of artistic interest. In contemporary practices such as audio-visual performance and electronic music, this strategy often involves a focus on the mechanical, electronic and material qualities of the instruments themselves, as well as the re-processing and transfer of the signals they produce.

From pure sine wave to thumping sub bass this will be a sublime and immersive one-off opportunity to experience some pretty extreme electronics and visuals, in the extraordinary industrial architecture of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. A 10 metre wide screen, an awesome sound system, cushions on the floor and an open bar. Immensely powerful, rhythmic and penetrating, this programme, in this context, will not be repeated. Book your tickets now, and don't forget your earplugs!

Sachiko M with Benedict Drew

Both accomplished improvisers, Sachiko M and Benedict Drew will punctuate the evening with precise, uncluttered simplicity. This performance presents the premier of a specially commissioned, new work, an open-ended improvisational strategy that seeks to amplify the stark industrial environment of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The collaborative work makes visible the process of live interaction involving the real-time shaping of time-based sculptural elements. The collaboration will present a non-cinematic, audio-visual score involving kinetic imagery and pure sine wave. Benedict Drew presents a lucid visual field of magnified objects. Sachiko M’s muted soundscape, at times penetrating and at other times, virtually subsonic, forms a concentration of tones and frequencies that dialogue with Drew’s visual elements.

AVVA

For their performance at Tate Modern, AVVA will be performing a live improvisation, under the title of Nemu. AVVA is the duo of Toshimaru Nakamura and Billy Roisz, AVVA stands for "Audio Video/Video Audio", referring to the working method of the duo. Nakamura produces music using the internal feedback from his no-input mixing board; its musical inner workings exposed and stripped bare by recursive feedback loops. This is input into Roisz's video mixer becoming a source for its generated imagery. The result is colourful and shimmering. Between reduced sound and an extensively emptied picture, between a skeletal rhythm and a matrix of video lines. Nakamura's thumping feedback and clicking pulses infect the entire structure of the image, trembling and reflective. The image flickers and hums in response to high-frequency microtones forming continuous interwoven patterns.

Ryoichi Kurokawa

Three dimensional pixel sculptures are the result of Ryoichi Kurokawa’s audio-visual synthesis. Kurokawa destructs and reconstructs architectonic and organic abstractions with precision, coercing a complete surrendering of the senses. A minimal, yet chaotic conflux of visual and auditory perception merges into an experience of memory and ambiguity where virtual and actual images are no longer distinguishable. Kurokawa uses what he calls an “audiovisual organ” to compose spatial-time sculptures out of digitally generated material, formed from analogue field recordings. Abstract sound and imagery are perfectly synchronized, asserting a form of glitch minimalism re-assembled into complex and highly rhythmic audio-visual landscapes. Kurokawa accepts sound and imagery as a single unit, constructing precise and exquisite computer-based works that demonstrate a unique audio-visual language.