Off The Record, in collaboration with the RUFA Department of Multimedia Arts and Design, will host an exquisitely curated three-day event in the municipality of Cerdanyola del Valles (Barcelona) from 13 to 15 June 2024, transforming the splendid villa of the Masia Cordelles into a vibrant melting pot of art, music and craftsmanship.
A collaboration that aims to highlight the work of young Italian and international artists engaged in advanced experimental research in the analogue and digital fields. The exhibition, curated by Caterina Tomeo, coordinator of the master’s course in “Multimedia Arts and Design”, is a homage to the first electronic music concert held in Rome in the 1960s and curated by Franco Evangelisti.
Four unique audiovisual installations, inspired by the works of famous authors of the past, will be exhibited inside the villa, offering the public a perceptive and synaesthetic experience linking past and present through innovative audio and visual art.
Audiovisual installations by Multimedia Arts and Design students
Conversazione Articolata by Martino Cassanelli, Karina Sánchez (AUDIO); Andrea Cecconi, Federica Silli Bentivoglio, Olimpia Zamó (VIDEO) is a tribute to Artikulation by G. Ligeti capable of establishing a conversation between the present and the past and between two techniques of sound genesis: synthesis and montage. In fact, the proposed re-adaptation makes use exclusively of material taken from Ligeti’s original track, reworking the extrapolated sounds through different DAW reading algorithms, yet keeping in mind the experience of Pierre Schaeffer’s Musica Concreta so as to create a further dialogue between different but related disciplines. The image recreates the fluidity of the track through the soft and elastic movement of particles and noise; the subdivisions of the screen constantly talk to each other, contaminating each other and creating a succession of cause andeffect: a particle chain reaction.
The work Distruzioni sonore by Lucrezia Mariotti, Ada Ugyan (AUDIO); Sara Fabretti, Rosalia Giuliano, Simona Lauro (VIDEO) takes up the piece Klangfiguren II by G.M. Koenig, giving it a visual interpretation based on the concept of destruction. This action is analyzed from different aspects, finding its instincts in the natural and industrial worlds. The video sequences, reassembled from stock footage, are modified through the use of software, emphasizing the transition from the analog to the digital world; the audio, on the other hand, is altered to achieve a more drone and ambient aesthetic.
The installation Riflessi di fasce sonore (Reflections of Sound Bands) by Paola Belviso, Agostino Maria Domanico (AUDIO); Francesca Battaglia, Daniele Imani (VIDEO) stems from Incontri di fasce sonore, the famous piece of concrete music written by Franco Evangelisti, which originated from the sound of seven oscillators being imprinted on magnetic tapes. The audiovisual project extrapolates some data from the original score of the piece to give life to the original intentions of the work, through the same expansion and dilation of the score through synthesis and manipulation. The sound aspect, at the same time, echoes the techniques used in the piece by responding to visual stimuli with modulation, granulation and reverberation. Franco Evangelisti’s voice then replaces the sine waves, becoming the raw material of the aforementioned manipulations.
Finally, Francesca Battaglia’s research project Il soffio di Calima (The Breath of Calima) – which focuses on the climate emergency – will be presented, recounting the importance of the Calima wind, which is a natural phenomenon that lifts grains of sand from the Sahara Desert and transports them to remote places, including the Amazon rainforest. Thanks to the magic of this wind, sand from the Sahara is able to reach the Amazon, whose soil is too dry and poor in nutrients, bringing life for plants and animals. Thus, the video shows this story of connections and transformations, giving rise to parametric geometries (symbolizing the very structure of plants) with a colored sandstorm, trying to represent one of the many invisible relationships that characterize our reality.
Watch the event teaser
