Monochrome Video Art Explores The Gap Between Sight and Sound What happens when two actors start to explore the intersection between contemporary art and new technologies? Studio Antimateria is born: Stefano Caimi and Marco Salvi, studio co-founders, have been developing the art of audiovisual projections and mappings since the studio’s conception in 2012, and Sync – A/V Performance is one of the experimental fruits of their labour. Check out its glitch aesthetic and cracking rhythm: This video is a recording of a live performance produced by spontaneous and simultaneous generations of audio and visual data, by a programme created by the pair using open-source software (Processing for visuals, and Supercollider for the sound). Through the simultaneous generation, neither audio nor visuals ‘come first’ in the artistic process. Synchronising audio and visual data in a digital context is Antimateria Studio’s way of re-establishing the natural linking up of audio-visual phenomena that is sometimes lost in the digital world. And it fits neatly with the particle and anti-particle structure of Antimateria’s namesake theory of physics. Having collaborated with Pandora and Brivaplast, the pair are swiftly mastering and exploring ever deeper this new field. We caught up with them both to do a little exploration of our own. The Plus: Tell us about the inspiration for this video. Studio Antimateria: We were driven by a desire to explore how to represent an image with its correlative sound, creating geometrical and minimalistic shapes that could move alongside the sound as an organism would. The decision to use glitchy visuals aligns with this: the idea of managing something not entirely controllable, as if it has a life of its own. TP: And what originally drew you to this focus no synchronising visuals and sound? SA: We wanted to inspire people, moving them emotionally with multi-sensory material, whilst treating this material as a single gesture or event. The way we found worked best was to tighten the synchronicity between eyes and ears; that’s what we’re trying to bring back to the digital arts. TP: What do you particularly like about coding art, which you did for this video? SA: It allows us to play an audiovisual work as a musical instrument, giving life, every time, to a unique performance, entirely generated in real time, in order to dialogue with the audience and the place we are in. TP: How far does technological innovation influence your work? SA: Totally. We’re fascinated by every human discipline which creates new logical instruments that we can use into the creative process. TP: If coding can create art, are you concerned – as an artist – that computers will be able to create art that rivals that of humans? SA: A computer will be never be able to create art as we define it, because it is impossible for it to create something which is meaningful in a human sense. This is really difficult to be define, because whilst for a computer A is always equal to A, that isn’t necessarily the case in human communication.
