Cloud Torrent (CY)
5th of October 2023 | 19:00 onwards
Home for Cooperation
FREE ENTRANCE
About the performance:
A multimedia installation consisting of white synthetic cotton skeins which are folded and intertwined, creating links (turning points). The three-dimensional form of the cotton simulates a woven cloud in continuous disturbance, ready to burst. The cloud is supported by an array of motors which are connected to movement sensors (PIR – ultrasonic sensors). Thus, its movement is affected by the movement of the viewer. The sensation of the storm is enhanced by an intense computer-generated sound effect, reminiscent of a ticking clock, influenced by the audience’s movement beneath the cloud. The installation simulates a symbolic chaotic system. The viewer’s interaction indicates continuous alternations of order and chaos, memory and oblivion, silence and rumble. The entire installation is controlled by a programmed microprocessor. A real-time video footage is projected on the cloud in an attempt to manifest the depiction of our memories and imagined future. The footage is live-recorded by a camera placed outside the installation that captures the movement of the festival’s attendees and it is processed with modern computer vision algorithms. Through the technology itself, the audience interacting with the cloud is able to instill the cloud with meaning. The cloud, as a modern allegory of memory storage, illustrates a monument of collective memory which is constructed out of our movement and the proximity of our bodies. The buffer zone, as the place in between competitive memories, invites us for an interactive performance to stimulate our senses and drive us into oblivion with the hope of “return” and the desire to (re)construct our common memory.
Turning Point: A sensorial cloud between chronotopes
Entropy is prevalent, audacious, silent. Its presence is as blatant as peaceful. It fears none, describes all: the universe, the self, and Cyprus as a marvelous physical place, as a geopolitical system, and as a set of all the interactions between the people that take place continually and imperceptibly. The “Turning Point” is intangible, unnoticeable by a present observation, yet it resides in the beauty of our daily interplay and activities. As order resurfaces from chaos, although impossible to notice, the “Turning Point” embodies an unceasing state of evolution that remains detectable exclusively in the unfolding future.
As the world and our society are mesmerized by the unpredictability of the future, this chaotic universe generously provides us with the means to imagine in ways we construe unimaginable. The utilization of new technologies, as a meta-level approach, can be catalytic for the discovery (or the invention) of the “Turning Point”. The “Turning Point” is not an event or a handshake. It’s fused into people and it’s imaginable by the convergence of art and technology.
The installation points to a collective cloud. A monument implanted in the buffer zone’s sky, storing all our vulnerable memories whose existence is hounded by surveillance and abductions.
Cotton is retrieved from the island’s history, uttering the story of harmonious coexistence; it is intertwined, forming strange loops and tangled structures to exhibit our common past and future. The formed cloud is phenomenically still, yet unbounded and infinitely present. It’s us, the compressed water vapour, projected onto our common sky. It is a repository of our anamneses. Despite floating in the sky, it can cement a change, a “Turning Point”.
The projected visuals on the cloud provide a means to imagine the physical and intangible space between us as it is possible to exist. It attempts to construct the statement that our present doings and daily interactions are stored in our collective memory, the cloud. It also acts as a testimony that Art itself entwined with technology, is the “Turning Point”.
Credits:
Costa Philippou, Lefteris Ioannou, Kostantinos Apostolou
