LABS

Latent State by Andres Colubri

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"Four snapshots taken during the Latent State performance. Digital and physical elements were combined to inhabit the liminal space between the cinematic screen and the performance stage."

Leonardo Abstract Services (LABS) 2010-2011
Latent State: A Theoretical and Practical Study of Live Cinema

This work explored the practice of live cinema performance, which can be defined as the creation of audio-visual pieces where the recording, editing and projection/playback of the video and sound material is performed by the artist(s) in real-time in front of a live audience. This exploration was carried out in three complementary levels: a meta-level concerned with the narrative and audiovisual languages involved in this type of live performances, a technically-centered level that dealt with issues of software architectures and interfaces suitable for real-time manipulation of video, audio and post-processing effects, and a more “practical” level which involved the entire process of creating a live cinema piece from the initial conceptualization to the final performance event.

Thematically, the live cinema piece that resulted from this work can be seen as a meditation on the collision of childhood fantasies with the harsher facts of the “adult” world, such as tragedy and death, within a highly mediated environment. Footage from the accident of the space shuttle Challenger on January 28th, 1986, intertwined with playful fantasies of space travel, supplied the raw visual and emotional substance for these meditations.

From a technical standpoint, this piece was created using new open source video and image manipulation libraries for the Processing programming language. This libraries and other software components used in the piece are part of an ongoing research on real-time audiovisual practices, particularly from the standpoint of performer-computer interfaces. The combination of high performance video capabilities with the ease of use and accessibility of Processing leads to an opensource framework where live cinema and other real-time audio-visual experiments can be carried out more freely.”

Degree: Master in Fine Arts
Year: 2009
Pages: 83
University: University Of California, Los Angeles
Supervisor: Erkki Huhtamo
Semail: erhuhta@ucla.edu
Supervisor 2: Casey Reas, Jennifer Steinkamp, Daniel Shiffman
Language: English
Dept: Design Media Arts/Live Cinema
Copyright: Andres Colubri
Lang_author: English, Spanish, Korean
Url: http://interfaze.info/latent-state
Email: andres@interfaze.info
Keywords: Performance, Live Cinema, Real-Time, Space Shuttle, Challenger, Childhood
LEONARDO ABSTRACTS SERVICE (LABS) is a comprehensive collection of Ph.D., Masters and MFA thesis abstracts on topics in the emerging intersection between art, science and technology.

If you are interested you can submit your abstract to the English LABS, Spanish LABS, Chinese LABS and French LABS international Peer Review Panels for inclusion in their respective databases. The authors of abstracts most highly ranked by the panel will also be invited to submit an article for consideration for publication in the refereed journal Leonardo.

Lanfranco Aceti is known for his social activism and extensive career as artist, curator, and academic. He is a research affiliate and visiting professor at ACT @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Arts Administration Program at Boston University. He is also the Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, The MIT Press. He has exhibited numerous personal projects including Car Park, a public performance in the UK at the John Hansard Gallery; Who The People?, an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by the Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester; Sowing and Reaping, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus; and Hope Coming On, a site-specific choral performance he designed for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with the collaboration of the Boston Children’s Chorus, and realized in front of Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). In 2017, Aceti prepared a series of new artworks for an exhibition entitled Shimmer and curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&A) at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra, a new large choral performance titled Accursed for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and Knock, Knock, Knocking a public space installation in the Mediterranean Garden Pavilion of the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki.