Share Prize Interview: Teatrino Elettrico

October 25, 2010 10:29 am

Teatrino Elettrico has been selected for the Share Prize 2010 exhibition, that wil be presented from the 2nd until the 7th of November at the Regional Museum of Natural Science of Turin.

– What was the idea that first inspired you? What mistakes did you make and what have you learnt from this project?
What we wanted to create was live media, produced completely live. Sound and visual amplification is what we use to make small parts of everyday electrical goods explode. The lack of physical substance in live media produced by laptop is what drove us away from digital code and digital controllers. The challenge also lay in finding something powerful and explosive using small, familiar, everyday objects that otherwise appear harmless.
Error plays a fundamental role in this project. Working with analogue signals is limiting for us in practical terms, but it lets objects surprise us so much more, through the imprecision of a mechanism based on approximation and unpredictable factors at the design level. Here audio and visual languages are used synaesthetically. The performance is a lot like channelling a flow of independent forces that we somehow manage to direct. The result is an unpredictable and completely random object, which we can only sit back and watch alongside the audience at the moment it is created.

– You have described DC12V as a desktop tragedy in one act for self-propelled machines. What do you mean by that?
We used this description because it highlights the juxtaposition of the anti-heroic nature of the desk where the objects are taken from in daily life, and the epic excitement that the objects unleash in our performances. We use the great evocative power of the objects in a narrative torn and ripped to shreds, in a crescendo that feels a lot like a descent into hell. What we create is a wild, distorted message with lots of noise, sometimes too much noise for the message conveyed, which is blown apart once its physical limits are reached.

– DC12V is an audiovisual performance that in our immaterial age takes a series of common objects and technologies and places them on centre stage, creating an intense live experience thanks to the use of microphones and cameras. Could we see it as a live ecological show that reuses objects that are otherwise forgotten and ignored?
Recycling and self-production belong just as much to our lives as to our art. We try to reuse the devices we find and collect, as though they were natural materials. It is very practical working with objects that otherwise would just get thrown away. It gives you a freedom that expensive equipment would never allow. It is definitely about bringing back to life otherwise dead and buried devices, though we tend not to give the process excessively ecological connotations. We are more attracted by a certain aesthetic, which at the same time denotes a certain distrust of the future and of human progress. We use technologies that we can access easily. We have no positivist belief in sustainable evolution. It’s more just the fun of fiddling with the bits and pieces that survive the ongoing catastrophe of production.