Imago


' Stadtwerkstatt Stadtwerkstatt

A Piece for Solo Vocalist about Multimedial
Representation and Reproduction

The singer is reduced to face and voice and stylized as a triptych: in the middle, the real head of the singer flanked left and right by three-dimensional representations of him.
The singer relinquishes himself to the point of self-abnegation. Digital machines dismantle, transform and duplicate his voice, and ultimately merge it in its frequency domain with other sounds.

The recursive relationship between voice and machine leads to successive dissolution of the difference between analog and digital sound sources for the listener and the singer. Although the singer remains outwardly the creator and authority in charge of the acoustic events, the purported expansion and enrichment of the vocalized expression ultimately turns into manipulation and estrangement.
This process of representation, reproduction and estrangement is continued on the visual level. The digital portraits of the singer begin to develop lives of their own. They cease functioning in accordance with the norms of self-representation. Under the influence of the music, they undergo changes and deformation. There arises the suspicion that the deformations represent the singer’s actual situation, which is to say his loss of control. Finally, they dominate the singer and eradicate him completely.

A production of STWST for Ars Electronica 2005
Programming, animation: Joreg, target=blank class=link> http://joreg.ath.cx; http://vvvv.meso.net
Modelling: Diane + Team / MESO
Max/Msp/KYMA programming, audio processing, multichannel mix: Michael Strohmann / Fuckhead, XDV.ORG
Voice: Dietmar Bruckmayr / Fuckhead
Production management: Olivia Schütz, Dagmar Schink / STWST
Sponsoring 3D Scan: Institut für Diskrete Mathematik und Geometrie an der Technischen Universität Wien