Spuren

Project description

Spuren is an immersive experience of 60-70 minutes’ based on projection mapping in which the audience is led to explore different abandoned places around the world. 
Spuren is based on the memory of abandoned places; traces of lived-in places that once had life but for reasons unknown have fallen into disuse. These places are witnesses of the past, and its state of destruction signals the ghostly absence of Man and of its humanity. They draw a poignant and brutal observation but these images also provide a space for imagination and creation. One is free to project one’s thoughts, fantasies and scenarios and contemplate the untold stories and dramas behind the beauty of these empty and dilapidated places.

Artistic intentions

With my project, I wish to give another life and lend a new perspective to these abandoned places by using the evocative and abstract power of music and sound.

Using real images from the videographer as a springboard to create a sensorial and immersive experience, my approach will be an empirical one where the sonic and artistic dimension I will propose, comes out directly from the images of these places.
Spuren is an invitation into this immersive experience in which visual material combines with sound material in a constantly renewed relationship. More importantly, this is a statement on the consequences of industrial capitalism and exploitation, and it is my invitation to the audience on a broader reflection on the memory and the future of human achievements and their relationship to it.

Implementation
For a complete immersive experience, the project brings together instruments, voices, electronics and video sequences projected via projection mapping so that the audience is enveloped and finds themselves at the heart of these atypical places.

Visual part
The images will stem from footage collected from various parts of the world, that sometimes share a common fate of abandonment. These images include representative places (e.g. Hospitals, theme parks, hotels, factories) that display the different contexts of human life, its history, and the traces of its previous activity.

Musical part
The musical composition will be shaped from the impressions left by the images, and from sounds collected during the various shoots .
The instrumental ensemble (details of the instrumentation are attached) will be amplified. Certain instruments will be highlighted by a solo writing and transformed through live audio processing using Max MSP.
In general, the musical writing will focus on:
- orchestration and development of sound material to create moments of contemplation. The field recordings of the various locations will be analyzed and used as a model to create instrumental sound material and will be of influence to the actual final on-screen images.
- development of pulsating and rhythmic sections are intended to evoke the memory of a past activity. These moments of activity and rhythmic energy will also influence the articulation of images in the video.

Music / video relations
In addition to amplifying the live musicians, their sounds will be processed and transformed using the computer. The data from the analyzed audio signal will in turn be used to affect the images in real time through a specific mapping process in Max/Jitter. The nature of these transformations will be in direct relation to the interpretation of the ensemble. The goal is to create an interaction between music and image, in which one acts on the very nature of the other.
The sight/sound relationship is combined in 2 ways: simultaneously and in alternation.
- Simultaneously: the music and image operate in synchronous relationships, or in a dramaturgical counterpoint relation in opposition to one another.
- Alternation: music and images exist independently, without the desire to create an "added value" of one dimension to another.