Nancy Mauro-Flude

It's Friday night and the Peacock Theatre space, Salamanca Arts Centre is buzzing.

A makeshift bar is set-up stage left, a wall of technology around the periphery and a group of artists intently operate laptops, hardware and mixers. Another door burrows off into two darker backstage rooms; one is empty of people but full of red theatre seats and a screen emanating white noise; the other resembles a hall-of-mirrors filled with low-tech analog hardware (16mm film projectors, mixers and so on).

In the flickering light I stand inside this door and think how the current renaissance of low-tech analog media is not simply a retro-nostalgic phenomenon, but an artistic reclaiming of social media.

The audience enters and congregates in tight clusters on the theatre seats, waiting first, then exploring the space. The conventions of the event hang halfway between a theatre where the audience is highly regulated (lights fade to black as code to ensure silence, theatre seats facing a stage) and a nightclub where I can grab a drink at anytime, and assume a certain autonomy to move in and out of spaces as I wish.

I glimpse the waving motion of an arm from the corner of my eye and turn to catch momentary flashes of a video projection on the floor of the main theatre. People are hastily walking through it, their motion triggering another projected video layer which effectively chases them across the space. A number of concurrent video streams are drawn from a database containing video fragments of various lengths. As the AV data morphs into one another in a semi-random fashion, the meanings created are, at best, temporary and emergent.

Approaching for a closer look I avoid a group of mannequins, dressed up in urban street wear and standing centre stage in a horizontal line facing the audience seating. These figures stand unmoving in unity. Their output consists of single message signals, the head colour changes in time to an accompanying beat – reminiscent of an octopus which communicates via its dye spectrum.

After the first two acts, an announcement is made over a microphone about the works seen, and the works of the artists that are forthcoming. I catch myself taking a theatre seat closest to the door in order to grasp the bigger picture of the event as a whole.

Sound to Light brings to the fore how liveness is still a crucial factor to be re-considered and revalidated in the age of digital media. The negation of audience and a certain neglect in general of what it means to be intimate in a theatrical setting is perhaps brought about by an overt technical focus that comes with the commodification of electronic performance tools.

Artists:
Sound/Music: Fred Showell, Scot Cotterell, Mat Neidra, Brock Vince and Patana Berretta.
Video/Vision/Film/Light: Joe Hamilton, Pip Stafford, 313RGB, Andrew Harper and Jason James