Description:
/S)CONFINAMENTO – first chapter / hic sunt leones
Networked digital performance for live webcam & synth
The Italian *piazzas* are framed by a webcam system that broadcasts online the flow of their chaotic life. A cold, indifferent look, in the sun or in the rain, which does not change in the midst of changes. Those squares are now deserted, while life in quarantine is hidden invisibly inside the houses, inside the silent buildings that harmoniously surround them. The webcams today collect the testimony of a surreal event. All the life, once feverish, becomes now a fleeting and ephemeral circumstance: the squares are manned by police vans, enlivened here and there, by the flight of a seagull, by a flag in the wind, by a runner’s bicycle, by a masked couple walking a dog. In the silent void, these short passing lives, these lonely adventures of the confined city, are narrative elements of a dystopian story, which I spy and pursue avidly as if I were at the window of one of those buildings. Through motion tracking technology, I steal the webcam signal and feed it to a software that I created for this project, which records and tracks visually the movement of people, vehicles, objects, and animals, transforming the data flow in a concert for synthesizer: the smallest movement produces a sound, a modulation, a graphic visualization, a digital effect. Finally, I return everything to the network, through live streaming on Facebook, in a creative ring of manipulations and interpretations in real-time – an open semantic loop that ideally gives a voice to the mute explorers of the locked city.
video of the live performance – https://vimeo.com/404843767
website of the project – https://sconfinamento.tumblr.com/
