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Cabaret Voltaire: A Contemplation Of Dangerous Games
This performance is not of Cabaret Voltaire's usual genre. This performance is especially designed for the Ars Electronica Festival to use Cabaret Voltaire. More ambient elements of both sound and vision combined to ultimately present an audio visual presentation of a new language. It will draw elements from the theatre/rock performance/film and most important televisual language. The groups approach to both sound and their developing visual art has always been basically the same. Primarily to remove the restrictions of "technical standards" from their artistic considerations their use of the very latest computer technology to generate sound is to them only of equal importance to their use of cheap audio cassette recorders. Both have qualities of sound that are of use and interest to the group. It is that intrinsic and individual quality that is their base of choice. They apply the same approach to their visual "selection" process and this performance will demonstrate this approach.
The group consider all commercial standards appropriate for their appropriation. As part of the performance they also explore the viewers' abilities to receive and retain information by using multiple screens and projections therefore using the space of the Brucknerhaus to the fullest extent… The relationship between the multiple images within the space will cause each viewer to have a unique and personal interpretation of the performance. This use of multiple images causes a viewer to apply their own "editing" of information. Therefore requiring them to establish their own story values, this creating a personal understanding/relationship with the performers' material.
Cabaret Voltaire will also include the physical sounds of technology. The sound of data being printed… the sounds of film projectors mechanically in motion… passing radio waves through the Brucknerhaus building… intercepted telecommunications both open and "secure".
All these media are open to interruptions including use and misuse (as is the real modern world of communication), the information to be distorted and manipulated through the artists' perception to create their own truth into which the viewer/audience can apply their own perception/truth.CABARET VOLTAIRE
ARS ELECTRONICA STATEMENT In general:
Do not believe otherwise!…—Machines make our cultural reality—our "shared" world of social representation…—All "other worlds" are abstract and empty…—All other realities are ugly (even realists take this view).
The power of audio-visual technology, compared to other media, lies in its ability to give more information as basic form… Information, however, is not truth nor even reality. Culturally "use is truth" our use of a medium structures our world and our identity…—And so "reveals" how we are used.
Our social mind is audio-visual images and soundtracks.
"Television: a device by which one is kept at a distance from the event one is witnessing."—Thus we are brought near but stretched-out in a void of painful longing for that which we cannot reach… Safe but tormented.
What an object for the social mind!…—an intangible man-made dream-image dancing to the pulse of desire and the sequence of longing.—Why do we use our dream-machine in this way?… Paying technology the philosopher's fee as, under the pressure of monstrous desire and bewildered by the lies of men, we pursue the temptations of the dreams that money has bought…
Why, when we dream we can believe that we are alive but when we are awake we fear that we are dying? (Dreaming is, by the way, a means of preserving sleep by suspending action in imaginary events.)
In particular:
DADA… Old impure syphilitic sire of our orphaned bastardy… All that we inherit from your impoverished gambler's ruin is your old pocket-knife "Cut-Up"—to which we have attached an electronic blade and the tattoo of contemporary rhythm.
Cut-up's assemblage syntax morphology applies equally to images, words and sounds… it disintegrates received order and deranges habitual categories of location and classification. With the resultant "cultural fragments" it constructs a synthetic and synaesthetic continuum that is not linear progressive narrative but autonomous formal structure—a structure whose main mode is contrast and analogy operated as critique. Dada and Surrealism bequeath collage and assemblage as mediums whose formal qualities are exactly suited to matching modern urban experience… The self-contradiction of city life with its cultural disarray and disunity that is by nature incapable of single consistent form. All formal devices (rhythm, duration, repetition, distortion, inversion, erasure, etc.), are employed on both "found" and "generated" elements. These elements are degraded and synthesized in an abstract formal structure that possesses expressive continuity without involving itself in a depiction that limits freedom by confining expression to the narrative and illustrational demands of a dominant ideology. In 'cut-up' the freedom of the act of compilation transcends the compiled material… Barriers are broken down, the forgotten recalled and the unknown apprehended. Audio-visual cut-up is a metaphor for the dreaming social mind… Do we awake as we change the quality of the dream?—Yet a dream of being awake may still give sharp pleasure to alleviate dull pain, reach the genuine by way of parody and speak some truth in its irony.
END.
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