Announce: Oniricam performing at 404 festival

After the debut of Oniricam (for Guy Debord) at the Live!iXem 06 festival in Rome last december, the work is scheduled to be performed this month at the 404 international festival of electronic art on four dates: Trieste (Italy) June 4, Wien (Austria) June 14, and Hasselt (Belgium) June 23, 2007.
Besides the authors, Luca Rivelli and Manuel Cecchinato, Paolo Antonio Simioni and Leonardo Gementi will also perform on stage for the occasion.

Oniricam (for Guy Debord) is an audio/video live electronics performance by Luca Rivelli and Manuel Cecchinato in which sonic emissions by custom-made analog audio synthesizers modulate three video streams in real-time. It is based on the retinal.tv video processor. On three screens we see a strem of images depicting the ghosts of the only form of reality we happen to know these days, the reality of spectacle:

Think of a house
In the house there's a room
The room is full of dreams
The house has fallen down in ruins
Only a room remains
We are in that room
The room is full of dreams
we are locked in the room

Guy Debord said: "To the degree that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the bad dream of enchained modern society, which ultimately expresses only its desire to sleep".
But Walter Benjamin, while thinking of one of Paul Klee's drawings, talked about an angel standing out there. He looks at the History and the World; we can barely reach him; we can only touch his simulacrum: this is what remains of the History of the World within the dream we are locked in. We have to try to wake the Angel of History up, to let him tell us the ruins he sees out there, in the world of the wake. From this dream room we don't know how to exit. But we can try to touch the Angel wanting him to tell us of the World.
The Paul Klee's Archangel drawing, engraved on copper, is the touch-plate controller of an analog sound synthesizer which generates sound, maybe the voice of the angel, a voice that modulates the images in our dreams (on the screens), maybe allowing us to look outside of the room. We could try to listen to this voice.

What is the retinal.tv modular video processing system?

Beginning August 2006, Luca Rivelli of retinal.tv started developing a modular system based on the Free Open Source real-time graphical programming environment Pure Data by Miller Puckette and two of its extensions, PDP and PiDiP. The system grew to become a full featured solution for real-time video processing, aimed primarily to video art performances and installations. The first work based on the retinal.tv system is Oniricam (for Guy Debord).