GIACOMO VERDE – MULTI-REVERSE
by Giacomo Verde (Verdegiac)
Music consultant: Massimo Magrini (Bad Sector)
Two huge screens provide the performer with his backdrop, one linked up to his laptop, the other to a video camera.
The video camera is also linked to the laptop, and points at its screen.
The laptop’s screen shows the interactive software EyeCon, whose interface transmits the pictures captured by the video camera.
The assemblage gives shape to a new video music ‘tool’ that places the performer, and his audience, within a very difference creative and perceptive context.
In this way, MultiReverse inverts the relationship between sound and image, as it is the moving pictures that generate sound, and not vice versa. Images are no longer a “backdrop” to music. Sound is no longer a “soundtrack” to images. Instead, both combine to form a true, unique audiovisual event that is different every time, as the environmental and emotional context changes.
(see video test: www.youtube.com/user/verdegiac – ISP section)
Audiences normally see performers bent over their keyboards or mixers, without really knowing what they are up to – the performance might actually be a recording or set up in such a way that live action counts little to nothing. By screening the software interface and the live video images, audiences are given an insight into the kind of real-time creativity that is going on, augmenting the spectacular nature of the show.
The objects chosen to make the music – broken circuits, iron chains, flotsam, burnt plastic, old valves – each have their own shape and symbolic value, creating the theme to be worked on and developed in each track. The video and soundtrack produced by each performance is recorded to create a digital memory, while at least one video frame is captured on a digital print, creating an analogue memory.
MultiReverse is part of the “SP – Immaterial Solders Project, launched to create multimedia events where sound is generated by pictures.
Just like the human voice is created by the specific way our bodies are shaped, so each kind of image generates its own special sound, its own ‘voice’, thanks to digitalization.
Drawing out “the song of pictures” is the creative field of action of the Immaterial Solders Project.
Giacomo Verde calls himself a “teknoartist”, while others call him an Artivist. He has been working in theatre and the visual arts since the 1970s. Since the 1980s he has produced works through the creative use of ‘low’ technology, such as video art, techno-performances, theatre shows, installations and learning workshops. He is the inventor of “tele-narration”, a technique also used for creating live-video-backdrops for concerts and poetry recitals. He was one of the first Italians to create interactive art works and net-art. He has worked with various different artistic teams as an author, actor, performer, musician, video-set designer and director. He lectures on video installation at the Fine Arts Academy of Carrara, on video-theatre at the Fine Arts Academy of Macerata, and holds digital art workshops for the University of Rome III. Reflecting on and playfully experimenting with the latest techno-anthropo-logical developments underway and building bridges between different art genres is a constant with Verde.
He recently published “ARTIVISMO TECNOLOGICO. Scritti e interviste su arte, politica, teatro e tecnologie” (Technological Artivism. Writings and Interviews on Art, Politics, Theatre and Technology). Preface by Antonio Caronia. Edizioni BFS, Pisa.