Festival

Presentation of results of the Special Program

Digital Dialogues

coached by Davide Gagliardi

 

with participants of the impuls Academy 2025

Tom Bañados Russell | Jieun Lee | Zouning Liao | Emanuele Savagnone composition, electronics

 

 

Zouning (Anne) Liao Thirsty Pulse, Touched —- for a potted plant, light and capacitive touch sensors (2024/2025, world premiere)

The inspiration for this piece comes from the fact that plants produce a subtle clicking sound when they are thirsty, a phenomenon known as cavitation. By incorporating light and capacitive touch sensors, the work explores the potential of transforming a plant into a musical instrument. This exploration invites the listener to experience the plant not just as a passive organism, but as a responsive and expressive instrument which is capable of creating sound, offering a new perspective on the symbiosis between living beings and technology.

 

Jieun Lee Aura (2024/2025, world premiere)

Accumulated experiences are deconstructed and restructured according to an individual's cognitive framework, influencing one another.

 

Emanuele Savagnone the message is (2024/2025, world premiere)

Initially animated by the beauty and nostalgia of cassette tapes, "the message is..." speculates on a far world that tries to make contact with a message on the nature of the universe.

 

Tom Bañados Russell .lifeline (2024/2025, world premiere)
Vitamin C++, taken with water. Twice daily until blood vessels are fully copper.

.lifeline is yet another piece-thing about Cyborgs, who need wifi as much as water to survive, active instagram accounts to be considered human and synthetic vitamins to be considered happy. But to keep things apolitical I also recite a poem about how nothing means anything until autumn colours and light at dusk to keep people distracted. Surely that will work!

In today's digital landscape, the ability to share data seamlessly across devices opens new horizons for creative expression. Digital sound, at its core, is data: waveforms encoded and manipulated within digital environments. This fundamental understanding invites artists to explore the intrinsic relationship between sound and data, blurring the lines between musical composition and digital information processing.

Musicians can interpret the interconnected nature of networked data as a metaphor for building relationships between sound, gesture and technology, facilitating reciprocal interaction between the performer and a digital instrument. Whether through real-time sound analysis exchange between performer and electronic instruments, interactive performance environments driven by networked objects (sensors, lights, video), or algorithmic improvisation, participants were invited to work on pieces that foster dynamic and responsive interactions between human expression and digital systems. This paradigm offered insight into creating new musical relationships, where digital and acoustic elements coexist and influence each other, akin to an expression of augmented reality where digital instruments maybe be driven by real-time data inputs and partially autonomous in decision-making.