POST ELETTRONICA
Special project

conceived by Letizia Renzini
curated by Valentina Gensini and Letizia Renzini

In a tribute to John Cage, the project Post Elettronica investigates territories of "post-electronic" experimentation revealing Cage's contemporary inheritance and presenting artists who share a dramatic and gestural use of new technologies. Hybrid works that combine music, video, performance, sculpture, sound, noise become vocabularies of a composite language in which the management of advanced software is combined with the artifact in an attempt to dissolve the conceptual approach towards the involvement of the viewer.
The interaction between visual arts and music, between movement and music become the subject of an original investigation novel, that aims at presenting an overview of contemporary experiences marked by new forms of experimentation.

Les Souliers (The Shoes) by French artist Arno Fabre transform the foyer of the Stazione Leopolda in a theatre/square with their "concert" of automata. Retro style and technology come together in this evocative and ironic "mechanical ballet".

The rhythms of Fabre’s shoes are echoed by the mechanical hamming of the installation by Swiss artist Zimoun with his animated walls. Hundreds of rods, each connected to a motor that gives them an oscillatory motion, invite to experience the physical dimension of the sound.

In the Spazio Alcatraz the project proposes performances and installations.

With Parthenocarp the Dutch artist Ronald Van der Meijs experiments the organic sound of the growth of a cucumber in a composition for three sound pictures. The scores, marked by the rhythm of the biological growth of the plants, give the space-time dimension, weaving harmony and disharmony through three large wooden instruments, which translate into sound vibration the "noise" of the fruit growth.  

New York born Nicolas Collins presents Tall Poppies, a minimal divertissement in three screens that reveals the small wonders of the concrete sound.

With a mechanical and auditive choreography consisting of radio receivers attached to a rotating arm and transmitters placed in the 4 corners of the space, the installation Carrier by sound and media artist Jeroen Uyttendaele explores the basic properties of communication technologies through a musical and spatial instrument.

American artists Kirsten Stromberg and Regan Wheat hand over the baton of John Cage with works about silence, capable of a subtractive and courageous synthesis.

French Til Berg transforms the evidence of the spatial acoustic phenomenon through the essential electronic image of his audio video installation.

Performances

Young cellist Theresa Wong, who trained in the US, proposes O Horizon, a solo improvised performance (cello, voice, objects) with pieces from the recent project Unlearning (Tzadik 2011) and objects proposed by audience.

In Echò Moiré, a robotic opera-ballet by Italian Matteo Marangoni, the performers are a pair of semi-autonomous loudspeaker vehicles which play the room staging a dramatization of the acousmatic compositional practice.

From Berlin, the Italian-Austrian duo Mat Pogo (vocals, cdj) and Ignaz Schick (turntables, motors, objects) comes to Alcatraz with a radical live set inspired by free jazz, between improvisation, noise, and live poetry.

Letizia Renzini will be Master of Ceremony of her Conferenza Muta, cinema for the ears of listeners blindfolded; an instant composition created following to the logic of the dj set.

La Chambre des Machines by Canadians Nicolas Bernier and Martin Messier proposes a concert for DIY machines and shows new possibilities around Cagean dichotomy between sound and noise, combining digital beats and sustainability, gesture and composition.

Composer and experimenter Nicolas Collins, trained with Alvin Lucier, director of STEIM Amsterdam and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, presents a performance on the fascinating world of the music recycling of printed circuit boards.

Spanish Pablo Palacio proposes his suite for sounds and light Facing The Blank Page, that uses stochastic processes, creating with Supercollider software a sort of mechanical ecosystem, where forms of reciprocal interdependence between sound and light offer audience an intense immersive experience.


With the support of: Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands – Olandiamo in Toscana, Swiss Institute of Rome and Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze - Osservatorio per le Arti contemporanee.