Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

Rikkert Brok & Maarten Halmans – (Shift)

Record players, lights, cameras, synthesizers… These are the ingredients Rikkert Brok and Maarten Halmans use to create their own equipment. Those of you who saw them live at the opening night of Electrified, the audiovisual summer festival organised by Vooruit, the S.M.A.K. and 5 voor 12, know that these guys don’t believe in high-tech gadgets. Brok and Halmans make figures turn around on a record player in front of a projector, creating abstract patterns on the screen.

For the performance Shift they also manufactured the required material themselves. A trunk full of light wands makes abstract patterns appear as from a Pandora’s box. Those images of light are projected and manipulated live by Brok and Halmans. Furthermore, the images influence the soundtrack and vice versa.

Ali Momeni & David Bithell – The liminal surface

David Bithell is a professor of Composition at the University of North Texas and focuses on the relation between experimental music and theatre. In an intimate face-to-face with his colleague Ali Momeni, elements of live performance, video, music technology and improvisation are blended into a playful game that hovers between tragedy and comedy. The duo taps on an enhanced tabletop with wooden blocks. As the performance progresses, they build real constructions with the blocks and the tapping progresses into a rhythmic composition with all the trimmings.

There are two works by Ali Momeni in the trail.

Derek Holzer – Tonewheels

The performance Tonewheels is an experiment in converting graphical imagery to sound, inspired by some of the pioneering 20th Century electronic music inventions. Transparent tonewheels with repeating patterns are spun over light-sensitive electronic circuitry to produce sound and light pulsations and textures, while projected graphical loops and textures add richness to the visual environment. This all-analog set is performed entirely live without the use of computers, using only overhead projectors as light source, performance interface and audience display. In this way, Tonewheels aims to open up the “black box” of electronic music and video by exposing the working processes of the performance for the audience to see.