Projects

Consonancias

Live art audiovisual works

CONSONANCIAS is a project that revolves around one of the most relevant trends in the encounter between art and technology: live audiovisual works.

The project started by creating eight couples constituted by a video artist and a sound artist, both with a pronounced experimental aesthetics in their productions. Each duplet was asked to develop three audiovisual pieces to be played live. From the recording of the presentations of these works, CONTINENTE, along with CAP ( Center of Audiovisual Production ), is producing an eight chaptered television series that will be emitted by the end of this year. The project concludes with the publication of a book that will compile theoretical texts about this type of audiovisual works and critical articles on each of the couples creations that formed CONSONANCIAS. This book will be accompanied by a DVD that will compile all the pieces presented within this project.

Consonancias appears in a time in which it is important to wonder about the scope of a new wave of technological developments, linked to the real-time treatment of moving images, where the appearance in the market of high speed processors, has motivated the abrupt appearance of an area of the aesthetic production that seemed forgotten in the field of art: the creation of live audiovisual. Though, from before the invention of cinema in the last years of the 19th century, and especially with the appearance of the electronic image, in the middle of the 20th century, we can find works that proposed a joint work of sound and image in real time, it is indisputable that in the last years this trend has increased with peculiar impetus. Starting in the 1990´s, the screens of images in movement and projections, along with plasmas, LCD and leds devices of great size have invaded discos and multitudinous festivals, mainly those dedicated to electronic music since, at least in its origins, they were aimed to a public that belongs to a social layer of seemingly desirable consumers. These new spaces for video unfold as a possibility to enhance the publicity at stake, true source of benefit in these kinds of events (even more than the income created by the sales of tickets and items consumed at the bar.) In this context Vj´s figure appears, in a wordplay that relates it to the Dj, the new star of the night. The Vj (video jockey) would be the one responsible for the ¨artistic content¨ of those screens, by mixing live, video images that would accompany the musical selections. In spite of the Vj´s wishes and conjectures, years pass and the moving images in clubs continue to fulfill a lateral function, similar to the illumination sets or to the mist, and fulfilling the task of creating a context favorable for the enjoyment of that which is the center of the party: the music. But, without putting in question the space and value of its activity, the truth is that the great popularity and expansion of the Vj’s trade stimulated the development of many digital tools for the live manipulation of images on video. These tools create an opening to expand beyond the tracks, since all the heavy and costly equipment that used to be necessary to edit and process live images, today is summarized to different programs that run on any domestic computer. This offers the possibility for video and cinema artists to approach the experience of playing images just as well as a musician performs a piece, in an area where the audio-visual relation can appear as equal and for an attentive audience.

Presentations

+ Pablo Denegri/Enrique Casal
+ Hernán Khourian/Santiago Villa
+ Luis Marte/Javier Olivera
+ Sami Abadi/Milena Pafundi
+ Leonello Zambón/Pablo Reche
+ Gustavo Gallupo/Ernesto Romeo
+ Carlos Trilnick/Jorge Haro
+ Rubén Guzmán/Enrique Bernacchini