ResonanCity
Live audiovisual performance
Many sounds and images in our everyday lives slip past our notice simply because they are too small, or because we lack the proper receivers to pick them up. “ResonanCity” is an ongoing project to gather these microscopic sounds and images from various cities, and to amplify and transform them. The goal is to build a new city of sound and visuals inside the old one, and to inspire curiosity and exploration of one´s own environment.

This audiovisual performance by Sara Kolster and Derek Holzer explores contemporary ideas about “Live Cinema” and demonstrates the principles and tools explained during their Pure Data workshops. Sound and image gathered in various locations around the world are rendered into a dreamlike journey in a live improvisation where sound and image are interrelated.

Both artists find inspiration in the history of experimental cinema and electroacoustic music, as well as in contemporary video and microsound practices, and a variety of live sources such as photographic film and found objects are used to generate the visions and sounds. Visually, Kolster´s work deconstructs the analog/digital dichotemy by presenting carefully prepared film positives in a software-manipulated environment. Similarly, Holzer´s realtime digital sound treatments highlight and enhance rather than obscure and distort the phonographic sources he collects. Kolster and Holzer also reject the use of common, commercial production methods and the default, commercial artworks that these methods often produce, preferring instead to program their own software, build their own hardware interfaces and actively participate in the free and open source communities which surround these activities.

ResonanCity has been performed live in Holland, Brasil, the Baltic States and the Transmediale 05 in Berlin. ResonanCity also took the Second Prize at the 11th International WRO Media Art Biennale in Wroclaw, Poland in May 2005.

All performances included into the competition appeal to the microsound aesthetics...existing on the verge of hearing physiology and musical composition. They all start from creating their proper software (including breaking off with the until recently fundamental musical composition term of the time line). Instinctively we can also feel the economic and political context of microsound understood as a movement boycotting commercial music technologies and distribution channels... The 2nd prize goes to “ResonanCity” by Sara Kolster and Derek Holzer, Netherlands and United States, for the exceptional quality of improvised live performance, intermediating concrete and electroacoustic sounds with experimentation of image.

–– from the Jury Statement, WRO 05 Biennale Wroclaw, Poland

Download documentation performance: resonancity_2005.mov.zip (177MB / 720x576)
resonancity_wro_low.mov.zip (85MB / 320x240)

2005-2006