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Seven pieces survey the canons of creative practices and principles of art to redraw classics. Embracing techne, they break fixed performance standards.

The Third Scroll takes as it starting point a compositional technique used by Flemish musicians of the 15th century. Bosacki’s score can be read in two ways: regularly – from left to right – and also backwards, which produces an original duet of indistinct images facing each other.

The Wrocław-based Wratislavia Chamber Orchestra and Jaron Lanier use the khaen – a traditional instrument of Laos – as the axis of a musical show in which the central role is accorded to the mouth organ. As Lanier himself blows air into the organ, he controls the virtual world on the screen in the semblance of a shaman who tears the veils off various – ontological, sonic, and temporal – realms.

The Spectral score project combines improvisation and the strict rigor of the score being performed. The sounds produced by the musicians are analyzed by a software which generates an interactive and constantly updated score. Krzysztof Cybulski’s piece is driven by a dual mechanism as the musicians execute and submit to the pattern of the score which is itself conditioned by their performance.

A concert for nine voices which are tilted on eighteen hydraulic jacks, forming a unique choral exoskeleton. The technological structure moves and determines the position of the performers’ bodies and voices, integrating them into one huge mechanistic organism. The human-machinic installation explores the breath, whose presence or absence depends on the collaboration of all parts. The Pendelum Choir studies the nodal points of machinistically constructed organisms and carbon-based structures.

Turntable techniques, applying which one can control the rotations of the record deck, gives Witold Lutosławski’s aleatory music a new incarnation. In Lutoscractch, Paweł Janicki explores relationships between sound and image, as the contingency and also the uniqueness of every performance are handed over to the audience, who can manipulate the DJ’s stand. By reversing or accelerating the record deck, the viewers can not only modify the sound, but also steer the drummer turning like a vinyl record.

Luc Ferrari conducts an orchestral concert accompanied by Bartosz Konieczny’s found-footage video. Both the music and the image center on an icebreaker, an expedition ship whose fortified hull makes it fit to set out to explore the most impassable, icebound corners of the world. The performance combines high modernist music and visualizations of the ice-cutting vessel to offer an ironic commentary on the age of the Anthropocene.

In a piece from the series exploring music passages, Piotr Bosacki draws on the “Netherlandish trick,” which involves reading the score simultaneously in the standard way and backwards. Bosacki put down his notes while staying at the WRO Atelier, and the piece was performed at Wrocław’s Contemporary Museum. The coiling-up corridor of the former bunker, in which one can move forward and backward without bypassing any spot, like across Bosacki’s piece, is in sync with the sounds played by the performers, highlighting the convergence of the musical structure and the architectonic reality.

 

MONDAY
Piotr Bosacki (PL)
Third Scroll
performance
Pokoyhof Passage
May 12, 2011
14th Media Art Biennale WRO 2011 Alternative Now

TUESDAY
Jaron Lanier (US)
Khaenoncerto
for khaen, virtual world, and orchestra
An Evening of Music for Virtual Worlds, Chamber Orchestra, and Solo Instruments
December 3, 2000
Aula Leopoldinum
WRO2000@kultura

WEDNESDAY
Krzysztof Cybulski (PL)
Spectral Score
performance excerpt
14 May 2015
Polski Theatre Świebodzki Stage
16th Media Art Biennale WRO 2015 Test Exposure

THURSDAY
Cod.Act /Michel Décosterd + André Décosterd/ (CH)
Pendulum Choir
choral piece for 9 a cappella voices and 18 hydraulic jacks
May 9, 2013
White Stork Synagogue
15th Media Art Biennale WRO 2013 Pioneering Values

FRIDAY
Paweł Janicki (PL)
LutoScratch
documentation of the installation
BWA SiC
15th Media Art Biennale WRO 2013 Pioneering Values

SATURDAY
Luc Ferrari (FR)
Brise-Glace (Icebreaker)
May 15, 2015
Wrocław Philharmonic
16th Media Art Biennale WRO 2015 Test Exposure

SUNDAY
Piotr Bosacki (PL)
The Fourth Scroll
documentation of the performance at the Wrocław Contemporary Museum
13 April 2012