FEEDBACK IMPROVISATION + BIO-BOX + UKI

Feedback Improvisation
In Yan Jun’s performance, he will set up a complex feedback system using speakers, microphones, a mixer and a performing artist, while also integrating the space, the artist’s position and the movements of the audience. The performance is concerned with no-input feedback and the delicate balance of relationships: performing artist and microphone, speakers and microphone, speakers and contact microphone. Each component of this network of relationships influences the others in a sensitive and unstable way—sometimes producing harsh, piercing noise, and at other moments more discreet and subtle sounds, all completely contingent on the dynamics of the space, the performing artist and his surroundings. The resulting sounds and their interruptions are always unexpected.

Bio-box
Bio-Box is an interface that uses biofeedback to establish audio communications between different living systems (mosses and algae). The interface takes a hybridized format, at once live performance and laboratory. The bio-box generates micro-voltage from the gestural responses of these bodies to physical stimuli such as light, vibration and touch. By rendering these electrical responses audible, the interface gives us access to the high sensitivity and complex sensory systems of different plants. The interface’s hardware consists of an operational amplification system which sends the analog signals to a microcontroller, while its communication software uses OSC messages between OpenFrameworks and PureData.

UKI
UKI Viral Love is the sequel to Shu Lea Cheang’s acclaimed cyberpunk movie I.K.U., which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2000. Conceived in two parts—both viral performance and game—the film tells the story of coders working for the Internet porn enterprise, GENOM Corp., dispatched to collect data on the human orgasm for a marketing study on consumption and mobile phone plug-ins. Following a large-scale internet crash, the coders find themselves stuck in an e-trashscape, where, alongside hackers and networkers, they are forced to scavenge the techno-waste. Amidst the rubble of wires, cables, boards and computers, the now-defunct coders seek the parts and codes that will bring them back to life. As a performance, UKI Viral Love takes the form of a hyper-jam session: a viral journey with live processed cinematic sequences created using a viral PD (Pure Data) patch and a troupe of coders, audio/video artists, and noise musicians from Montreal.