Mortal Engine 

(2008) 

produced by well known australian dance company Chunky Move. Director: Gideon, Interactive System Designer: Frieder Weiss, Laser performance: Robin Fox, Composer: Ben Frost.

Mortal Engine is a dance-video-music-laser performance using movement and sound responsive projections to portray an ever-shifting, shimmering world in which the limits of the human body are an illusion. Crackling light and staining shadows represent the most perfect or sinister of souls. Kinetic energy fluidly metamorphoses from the human figure into light image, into sound and back again. Choreography is focused on movement of unformed beings in an unfamiliar landscape searching to connect and evolve in a constant state of becoming. Veering between moments of exquisite cosmological perfection and grotesque evolutionary accidents of existence, we are driven forward by the reality of permanent change.

 

Source: Chunky Move

 

 

The choreographer Gideon Obarzanek and his technical team have created a seductive, intriguing piece of entertainment in Mortal Engine. The title reflects the dancers’ role in igniting the technology to project a sound and light show; the way they move, which can vary in each performance, triggers what the audience sees and hears.
The laser designs are bold and beautiful – especially the concluding sequence that brings viewers into the vortex of its tunnel of underwater green that changes shape from swirling clouds to walls of light that a dancer can put a hand through.
Robin Fox is the laser and sound artist, and Frieder Weiss designed the interactive system.

There are no pre-recorded video, light or laser images, and sounds are generated from movement data, or, in some cases, phrases already composed by Ben Frost. These phrases are triggered by the dance action or by an operator responding to where the dancers are positioned.
The lasers cover the broad Drama Theatre stage with swirls and squares that grow, shrink and tumble with hypnotic rapidity or stretch out like three-dimensional architectural projections. There are also more intimate lighting effects that surround the shape of one or a group of performers – these are the ones that remind us that, although the process is so fascinating and the visuals so engaging, Mortal Engine does have meaningful themes.

The dancers perform on a steeply ranked white square that can be divided and lifted to act as a wall. Mostly their action is floor-based, which allows them to be picked out in white light or shadowed in black. This sets up contrasts that can become conflicts, giving tension to solos in which strong body language suggests inner turmoil and duets that illustrate the give and take of relationships or, in one case, the darker self in the form of a hooded figure.

 

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

 

 

Mortal Engine, choreography, laser, dance, Live Visuals, Interactive

Reading

Expanded Cinema (1970) - In a brilliant and far-ranging study, Gene Youngblood traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. New technological extensions of the medium have become necessary. Thus he concentrates on the advanced image-making technologies of computer films, television experiments, laser movies, and multiple-projection environments. Outstanding works in each field are analyzed in detail. Methods of production are meticulously described, including interviews with artists and technologists. (John Coulthart)

The Art of Projectionism (2007) by Frederick Baker (in German) sets out the principles behind his use of projectors in the film making process. He defines a projectionist school of filmmaking and media art. In this publication he also presented Ambient film, a surround experience that can be shown in specially developed cinemas. (Wikipedia)

 

SEE ALSO

Kasumi is a video/sound artist whose interdisciplinary activities have included professional activities as a concert musician, exhibiting painter, published writer, theatrical designer, and film producer. Kasumi is one of the leading innovators of a new art form synthesizing film, sound and video in live performance. She has won global acclaim for her work in venues worldwide: from Lincoln Center with The New York Philharmonic to collaborations with Grandmaster Flash, DJ Spooky and Modeselektor. (Kasumi)

© Center for Visual Music

 

Composition in Blue (1935) - original title: Komposition in Blau. Surfaces dominate in the abstract animated film Composition in Blue by Oskar Fischinger. Colorful geometric figures are set in rhythmic motion. The music from Otto Nicolai's The Merry Women of Windsor is impressively visualized through a blending of form and color. (William Moritz: "Oskar Fischinger", in: Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt am Main, Optische Poesie. Oskar Fischinger Leben und Werk, Kinematograph Nr. 9, 1993, p. 42)

psychic communication 2 (2009) by Turkish drummer, producer and visual artist Volkan Ergen. He calls psychic communication 2 a "fantasia". (Volkan Ergen)

Synchronous Objects (2009) is an interactive exploration of choreographer William Forsythe's One Flat Thing, reproduced. It is the result of a collaboration between The Forsythe Company, based in Germany, and researchers at The Ohio State University from design, dance, computer science, geography, statistics and architecture who work together at OSU's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD). (Synchronous Objects)

Visual Kitchen explores the semantics of live AV performance and video art from a background of VJ’ing and music video production. As designers of moving images, VK adapts any kind of (non-)narrative structure into dazzling trips of visual flux, combining rigorously structured loops with soft- or hardware-generated chaos. The output is very diverse and versatile, from analogue photographic to digital minimalism, exploring the parameters of the canvas. (Visual Kitchen)