The following are the performances and video that were presented last night at RIXC media space as part of the Transbiotics Festival in Riga. Please note that due to the nature of the work and the lighting conditions my photos are not the best so do visit the links I point to for a better documentation of the work.

Planet A (image above) by Momoko Seto is an audio-visual composition (pre-composed and not live) which depicts a planet of salt crystals. The work, produced at Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains in France, simulates a science-fiction film set on a distant world, far away, beyond normal sight etc. yet is in fact a world seen not through a telescope but through a microscope.

Mucilaginous Omniverse (images above) by Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand consisted of Evelina, creating visuals, dropping droplets of silicone oil onto sonicated silicone oil which was filmed and projected, while Dmitry worked on the audio part of the performance. This was scientific demonstration as performance visualising wave-particle behavior, a phenomenon usually only visible at the quantum scale. Video produced during the performance had an effect on the sound and in return sound initiated and maintained the reactive process.

Materia Obscura (images above) by Jurgen Reble and Thomas Koner was an audio-visual performance, part live and part pre-composed. The visual material, consisting of approximately 25,000 scans of 16mm ‘chemograms’, are stored on Jurgen’s computer, archived, and then assembled in real time during the performance. Meanwhile the audio, created by Thomas, compliments the visuals as they evolved. While visually and sonically interesting, what was disappointing for me in this performance was the low levelness of the correlation between image and sound i.e. they did not seem to be connected in any sophisticated way as they had been in Mucilaginous Omniverse.