10th Performance Art Festival: Amplification — audiovisual physical live acts with Francisco López (Spain) + Evelina Domnitch (Belarus / Netherlands) & Dmitry Gelfand (Russia / Netherlands) Kustos :: Curator:Darko Fritz Croatia / Netherland :: June 1 – 2, 2010 :: Barutana, Tvrdavica 192, Osijek, Croatia.

All of the technological audiovisual setups on display here challenge the limits of human perception in the physically achieved audiovisual surroundings. The sound is continually being treated as a physical fact, whether a field recording, or created as frequencies using the analogue and digital machinery in the scientific lab experiment happening live on the stage. The sound as such participates in the composition of a new kind of auditive experiences tailored to each performance location, often varying with the observation point within the performance room itself. The programme is not a part of the ubiquitous global genre of trendy, laptop-based digital and audiovisual AV art, it rather considers the specifics of creative audiovisual performances in their physical and analogue forms, at times hybridised with digital equipment, referencing the material and physical aspects of the inputs and outputs, the physicality of their showcasing, and the expressions in the tradition of physical theatre.

The aural performances of Francisco López utilise the acoustics of the space within which the performance is staged on a multichannel sound system. López creates a sound sculpture in the space, using the directions and the durations of sounds that sometimes reach beyond the limits of human auditive perception. The sound is a physical fact and the raw material that shapes time and space. In his solo act, López intentionally negates the visual aspect, offering a negation of the visual perception to the audience via the available blindfolds, used at the audience member’s own discretion.

Gelfand and Domnitch use their research of the wave phenomena to investigate the issues of perception in regard to the stability, endurance, and immutability. They create performance installations that exist solely as perceptive sensations in constant flux. Their work entitled Sonolevitation features a 15 kHz standing wave generated between a transducer and a reflective surface. The sound creates condensed pressure fields strong enough to enable levitation. Slivers of gold foil are set to levitate, and their sonic responses create the performance.

The first collaboration between Francisco López and the team of Dmitry Gelfand and Eveline Domnitch is the audiovisual act entitled 10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid. As Lopez creates the aural image, laser beams are being projected through the reflective soap bubbles in micro and nano scales, to the rhythm of the created physics of the fluids and the light.