Audio-visual installation: camera obscura and 2-channel audio

A darkened room functions as a giant camera (obscura) as the scene from the street outside is projected upside-down onto a screen. The sound consists of live microphone feed from the outside manipulated by a max patch and shaped into a pattern of alternating segments of untreated sound and ‘freezes’, where a split-second of sound is ‘horizontalized’ and stretched into a sustained chord. The idea of the ‘frame’ as manifested concretely by the projector screen, and temporally by the patterns of alternating frozen and unfrozen sound, is central to the work. The presence of these frames asks us to consider at what point in the process of creative mediation/interference, the raw sonic and visual materials might be considered a work to be contemplated and experienced as art, rather than just a live streaming of reality.

This series of site-specific works has so far has seven installments: Performance Space #1/ Rue Darimon (September 2012, Qo-2, Brussels), Donegall Street (April 2013, Belfast), Northampton Square (June 2013, City University, London), Rue Royale/Rue Traversière (June 2013, Tuned City Festival, Brussels), River Medway/ Sun Pier (June 2014, Tone Festival, Kent), Voorhof van de Landcommanderij Alden Biesen (June 2014, Albanova Festival, Flanders) and Elisabethkirchstraße (September 2016, Mikromusik Festival, Berlin).