Displacements

Displacements is a music and video performance that thematizes the recording of walks in public spaces (a relatively recent and popular genre of videos on streaming platforms). In a place built to organize human displacements, a moving observer registers passing bodies: their directions, flows and speeds superimposed on the shades and forms of the environment are the visual information that feed an algorithmic composition based on shifts of space, time and color. The music, likewise algorithmic and mainly synthetic (but also including transformations of the sound captured during the footage), modulates its visual counterpart by providing an ethereal atmosphere uncorrelated with the expected soundscape. The work alludes to principles of the live coding practice as its performance happens in an improvised way through editing and running a pre-prepared computer code that controls the processes for music and video generation. The code is displayed as the top layer of the video, making available to the audience the performer's decisions, as well as the algorithmic structure of the work, and having an aesthetic role as part of the visual composition of the work.