ABOUT THE ART
The generative composition Exile and Other Syndromes is part of an augmented book project that responds to the current indisposition of migration, mobility, placeless-ness and nomadism, which are the impulses of a contemporary condition that eventually blurs the boundaries between the local and the global, the digital and the corporeal, the private and the public, or the intimate and the dehumanizing spaces, instilling a sense of semantic fatigue. The composition aims to transmute the contemporary city’s volatile, oppressing and tensed environments to encourage the contemplation and poetic musing of the listener navigating the intercepting urban spaces. The work develops fluid sculptural form of sound in a closely mediated interaction with sound-generated text patterns framing the contemplation of a nomadic listener as an artifact using an AI algorithm to read and transform the book’s content into live visuals. The performance of the work incorporates multichannel live projection of the visuals on multiple screens augmented with multi-channel sound. This specific method of artistic intervention examines the way memory, imagination and subjectivity of an itinerant listener frames the character of sound in the context of intensified urban interaction, mobility and nomadism.
The work is part of the Re:Sound Art Exhibition
19-23 August, 2019
At Musikkens Hus, Musikkens Pl. 1, 9000 Aalborg, Denmark
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay on Exile and Other Syndromes as a ‘new’ art environment:
Using digital technology, I endeavor to assemble a fluid and malleable environment, where the participation of the viewer/listener is crucial. If there is a newness to this environment, that is a renewed interest in proliferating a participatory and reciprocal relationship between the artist, the artistic experience and the perceiver of that experience. This so-called “new environment” is made of (post-)digital media meaning that medial devices are a convergence of old and new tactics and technologies, where interactivity between different layers of (re)presentation is more de-territorialized and fluid compared to older media, like a printed book. I love books. But it seems to me that the digital lets the words of a book free in time and space, and make them more ambient-oriented and context-aware. I also think that the semantic constraint of language could be ruptured in the digital realm to encourage an ambient poetics. This perspective directly relates to my performance from Exile and Other Syndromes that responds to the question of digital mediation of the sensory modalities of sound and the urban experience in modulated asemic textual patterns.
