The workshop gave me the opportunity to invite some great artists and friend to my favorite laboratory, the Gaswerk in Weimar. We started quite basic by finishing the screens that HP Großmann had welded before. Once the technical setup was established, we could start to epxlore the new instrument. For this we followed a simple rule: All content should be produced on location, that was true for the musicians Marc Sauter and Martin Schwengner and even more so for the video artists Swen Seyerlein, Benjamin Jantzen, Tobias Mathes and Stefan Kraus.
The basic idea was to send the image from artist to artist. Each artists manipulation is visible on the screen above their heads. The audience can see clearly who is working on what part of the image. At some point, the output of the last artist in the chain was fed back to the first artist as an input, creating a feedback loop. At this moment, the image becomes like a flow, that changes at each iteration but also travels in time and through the screens that become like windows in that stream. Every little manipulation affects the composition of everybody else. The setup had turned into a collaborative visual instrument.
While exploring the endless possibilities that were now at our hands, we looked for ways to turn the experience we had while jamming into an experience for the audience, by visually explaining what we did and framing free improvisation with dramaturgic interventions to create a dense 40 minute live performance. This was to be presented on the last day of the workshop to the Weimar audience. For this evening we invited Aude Francoise, who mesmerized the audience with her audiovisual seance "Rouge sang", using strictly analogue projections, before we presented our rather digital adventure in the next room.
Photos by Henry Sovinski, Aude Francoise, Swen Seyerlein, Stefan Kraus
Sceenshot by Seyerlein / Jantzen / Mathes / Kraus
A STUDIO100 Production / Gaswerk Weimar
Sceenshot by Seyerlein / Jantzen / Mathes / Kraus
A STUDIO100 Production / Gaswerk Weimar
