Festival de la Imagen - ISEA2017

TEMAS (tr. contact, touch) is a stochastic audiovisual performance. The software underlying the performance integrates the artist into a generative system as a module of analysis. The software interface affords control over probability distributions instead of immediate parameters. Sound acts as a seed; the artist listens, and in return, performs probabilities. All sounds and images are generated in real time. The graphics, which react to sounds, guide the viewers through the diegetic layers of the performance; the unfolding visual narrative highlights the contrasts between the alternating tools of the performance (i.e. a laptop and a modular synthesizer). The software design of Temas draws inspiration from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte, Morton Subotnick’s Touch, and Curtis Roads’ Touche pas. Temas, which generates purely abstract sounds and imagery, stochastically traverses the fine line between the organic and the synthesized, forming contacts with representationality.