Announce: Oniricam performing at 404 festivalAfter 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 houseIn the house there's a roomThe room is full of dreamsThe house has fallen down in ruinsOnly a room remainsWe are in that roomThe room is full of dreamswe are locked in the roomGuy 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.