This is a complete file of elements relating to the performance presented at the Louvre Museum Auditorium on October 14 2018 in Paris. I was accompanied by musician and sound designer Andrea Martignoni. It includes the exercises I did prior to the performance, the capture of the performance and a follow up project. It was a live scratched animation performance with a set up of two projectors loaded with loops of 16mm black leader of different lengths (51 sec. and 43 sec.) projected on the same surface so that the two images are intertwined. The projectors were running endlesly and my work consisted in engraving on the loose part of the loop temporarely out of the gears until the projectors pull on it. I would then continue to scratch on another available segment of the loop and so on. I was regularly changing position going from one projector to the other. The unequal lengths of the loops created a lag between the two series of images so that the resulting combination was always new.
I had decided to work differently on the two loops. Loop «a» was to be made up of more fluid and continupus animation freely inspired by Len Lye’s «Free Radicals», and loop «b» was to be treated with sand paper textures and more discontinuous developments. I also added colours to some of the frames (with blue on loop «a» and with red on loop «b») in a manner that I have developed for my last film But one bird sang not. This was done so that there were overlapping networks of flickers on the two loops inspired by Norman McLaren’s «Blinkity Blank».
Andrea Martignoni created the music in a similar manner with an ever running projector, engraving sounds on the part of a looped single sprockets 16 mm leader normally devoted to the optical soundtrack. Some of the sounds were then digitally processed.
In terms of general development, the performance was meant to start with very sparse sound and image interventions with no intent of getting them synchronized so that they would apppear more as loose constellations of audio and visual bursts. Slowly as more elements were added, images and sounds started to come together to eventually, toward the end of the perfomance, become a very dense and intense flow of sound and images. Somehow, at that point, the performance changes to more of an installation structure of an undetermined lenght were permutating series could carry on for a long time without repeating itself, due to the difference in length of the loops.
Preparatory exercises:
no-1
no-2
no-3
no-4
Performance:
extract:
complete capture:
Follow up to the performance.
Combinatory variations (work in progress using all the above elements):