Yannick Hofmann: Figure-ground (2020)

»Is it working?« is an introduction to the eponymous festival, organized by the Ljudmila association between August 24 and 28, 2020 at several locations around Ljubljana, as a part of the European network of educational and art institutions, EASTN-DC. The network discusses new shifts in digital paradigms at the intersection of art, science, and technology, with a particular focus on interactive, haptic, and multimodal principles. The exhibition presents works which use a variety of presentational and interface strategies as well as digital technologies to achieve diverse modalities of interactivity.

Figure-ground deals with the mental and cognitive processes oscillating between reflection and dissociation. As part of the performance, an audiovisual collage is created in real-time. Both the visual and the sonic layer aim at creating a kind of pareidolia effect. Utilising a real-time Canny edge detector, the outlines of a performer’s fragmented self-portrait feed a Gray Scott Model of Reaction Diffusion. Its values control the parameters of an electro-acoustic soundscape which has been derived from electronic manipulation of natural sound objects, amplified small sounds and field-recordings. The audiovisual real-time performance system was developed by Yannick Hofmann during the 2020 Corona lockdown.

Credits:

Video production: ZKM | Videostudio

Camera: Xenia Leidig, Christina Zartmann
Live Editing, Live Streaming: Peter Müller