Visible Bits, Audible Bytes 2019
Visible Bits Audible Bytes – curated by Bret Battey from De Montfort University’s Music, Technology and Innovation Centre – returned in 2019, once again exploring how artists and musicians from around the world are using new technologies to animate imaginative audiovisual realities.
With the support of the EU Interfaces project, Visible Bits, Audible Bytes commissioned award-winning Montréal video artist and composer Myriam Boucher to premiere a new audiovisual composition and installation artwork at Phoenix as part of the screening.
This event was part of Interfaces, a Creative Europe project which aimed to inspire more people of all ages and demographics to experience contemporary music and sound art and learn to incorporate the European musical legacy in newly found idioms and contexts. De Montfort University’s Institute of Sonic Creativity was a leading partner, along with nine other European institutions.
The full 2019 lineup was:
Order from Chaos by Max Cooper (UK) + Maxime Causeret (France)
Dialogues by Oli Carmen + Mark Pilkington (UK)
Untitled#1 by Fernando Alexis (Canada)
locus of everyday life by Sawako + kynd (Japan)
Empty Spaces by Myriam Boucher (Canada)
Rule 110 by Max Cooper (UK) + Raven Kwok (China)
Tesseract by João Pedro Oliveira (Portugal)
Lilium by Yaporigami + kynd (Japan)
Sky Pacers by Jing Wang (China/USA) and Harvey Goldman (USA)
Revsic by Richard Devine (USA) + Numbercult (UK)
Debridement Gold by David Arango-Valencia (Columbia/Canada)
Moment 08 by Morgan Beringer (UK)
Image: Still from Myriam Boucher’s Empty Spaces
A selection of the works screened for this edition of Visible Bits, Audible Bytes can be viewed below.
Order from Chaos — Max Cooper + Maxime Causeret
Order from Chaos focuses on the idea of emergence. Max Cooper dramatically transforms a recording of raindrops into a driving percussive polyrhythm to accompany Maxime Causeret’s animation, which starts with simple circular shapes matching the raindrops that transform into cell-like shapes before morphing into interconnected ‘colonies’ of virtual organisms.
locus of everyday life — Sawako + kynd
Exploring the borders between computer graphics and painting, locus of everyday life showcases compositions of colours reminiscent of the paintings of Kandinsky, reacting to tranquil music by Sawako, starting from sporadic sound of piano which gradually progresses into a dream-like drone.
Rule 110 — Max Cooper + Raven Kwok
Rule 110 is a code-based generative music video directed by Raven Kwok for the song produced by Max Cooper. The entire video is one continuous shot showing the gradual evolution of an elementary cellular automaton, revealing a vision of the fundamental aesthetics of a thinking machine. The piece forms one chapter from the story of One Hundred Billion Sparks, Cooper’s album project about the mind.
Lilium — Yaporigami + kynd
Real-time rendered splashes of colors explode over a harsh industrial beat. Lilium is an audio-visual experiment that combines Kynd’s research into watercolor simulation with music by Yaporigami/Yu Miyashita.
Revsic — Richard Devine + Numbercult
In Numbercult’s video, the visual elements engage the dynamics of the music, emphasising the elemental nature of the acoustic sounds by evoking sub atomic structures forming and splintering apart with electric flashes of colour.
