Visible Bits Audible Bytes 2018

The 9th annual Visible Bits Audible Bytes screening brought more genre defying audio-visual art to our cinema screens.

This year’s collection of works, curated by Prof Bret Battey of DMU’s Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, demonstrate how artists and musicians around the world are using new technologies to animate imaginative audio-visual worlds.

The centrepiece of the show was a powerful new 30-minute work by Montreal composer Jean Piché – Threshing in the Palace of Light – built around texts from Samuel Beckett. The show will also include a premiere from Francesc Marti (Spain) and works by Bret Battey (USA/AK),  Myriam Boucher (Montreal), Giorgio Bertinelli (Italy), Numbercult + Max Cooper (UK), and Tobias Gremmler (Germany/Hong Kong)

The full lineup was:

Cyclic (2016) by Numbercult + Max Cooper [UK]
Nuées (2016) by Myriam Boucher [Canada]
Virtual Actors in Chinese Opera (2016) by Tobias Gremmler + GuoGuang Opera Company [Germany/China]
Estuaries 3 (2017) by Bret Battey [USA/UK]
Scan_0.1 (2017) by Girgio Bertinelli [Italy]
Vacuum (2018) by Francesc Martí [Spain]
Threshing in the Palace of Light (2017) by Jean Piché [Canada]

A selection of the works screened for this edition of Visible Bits, Audible Bytes can be viewed below.

Cyclic — Numbercult + Max Cooper

The idea of cyclicality is captured musically with a simple arpeggiating riff and looped musical structure that builds without deviating from it’s repetition, while a visualisation of the complexity that can arise from nested cycles of different forms – each interacting with all others – intersects with the audio.

Virtual Actors in Chinese Opera — Tobias Gremmler + GuoGuang Opera Company

Created for a Zuni theatre production that fuses Chinese Opera with New Media, the virtual actors are inspired by the shapes, colours and motions of traditional Chinese costumes and dance. The project explores how costumes and motions can virtually reshape a human body.

Estuaries 3 — Bret Battey

Part of a wider series, in Estuaries 3 a sometimes hesitant, gentle ambiguity occasionally resolves into moments of counterpoint intensity and clarity. The artist’s focus was on spaciousness—slowly-developing audio and visual gestures—and, at the climax and close, creating a counterpoint of both events and gestures.

Vacuum — Francesc Martí

Vacuum explores the concept of audio-visual sampling, in which real-world images and sounds are cut, mixed, manipulated and reassembled in order to generate new audio-visual materials. In this piece, all the images and sounds are based in over 500 very short clips from Andrei Tarkovsky films.

Scan_0.1 — Giorgio Bertinelli

Scan_0.1 continues the artist’s exploration of the language between sound and image, with the visuals taking the form of a repeating pattern of white lines that emerge, shift and dissipate in synch with the audio.