The Italian collective Otolab mixes sound ("oto" means sound in Japanese) and multi-participant experiments ("lab" as in laboratory) to create highly expressive audiovisual productions. The goal is total synesthesia, founded on powerful influences and artistic choices, as suggested by Massimiliano Gusmini, aka Mud, one of the original designers of the team’s.
"Otolab" was born in 2001, when several video artists, musicians, designers and architects decided to join together and work collaboratively. Can you tell us a little more about how this collective creates and works together?
The most important point is, first of all, that a collective needs to have what I call "intellectual honesty". It's impossible to let your own work be severely critiqued if you don’t trust your partners. So everyone has to keep a handle on his or her ego, in order to be able to accept constructive comments and criticism. From the begin¬ning, we've considered our live performances as a meeting-point for a variety of disciplines. Thanks to the different zones of compe¬tence that are present within the collective, we can rapidly double check the relevance of our audiovisual projects. When we had just gotten started, only two approaches were possible: the artist's approach, with his indisputable choices, and that of the DJ, whose goal, above all, is to keep the dance floor on fire. We wanted to combine those approaches. So our priority became to define all the necessary aspects of our live performance projects, including impact on the audience, narration, reactivity, intensity, coherence, perception, and musical composition…
Impact is still very important for us, often more so than methods. A sophisticated design and/or an original technological system are devoid of interest if the experience, such as it is perceived by the audience, is a bad one.
Your pieces of work have often been struc¬tured around a tendency towards powerful, expressive graphics; they resemble architectural environments, bathed in an extremely heavy, electronic sound universe. Beyond this stylistic consistency, how would you describe the artistic impact you’d like to create?
We believe that the power and the intensity of the audience’s experience is primordial. We’ve always been attracted by various expressions of universality, even in states of altered consciousness. We tend to concentrate, as a result, on the dramatic structure of the audiovisual media; we try to find connections between the variants and the global complexity of perception. Real tension can only be created by linking images and sounds in a very precise way. Today, the new creative landscapes which define the core of audiovisual relationships are synesthesia and synchronization.
We feel that, in any live audiovisual project, each visual object has to be connected to a sound object. Things aren’t always so cut and dry, of course, but it remains nonetheless necessary to be careful about which elements you use. The sound track itself has to be the product of such a balance. We always try to avoid embellishments and decorations, or using elements without justification. I'm not sure why, maybe it's our reaction to Milan, our home city, which is an extremely high fashion city, full of very trendy musical and graphic scenery, and yet also culturally degenerate…
That means that live performances are your preferred means of production?
Yes, we mainly produce live audiovisual performances, much more than we do videos or installations. There’s something fascinating about live performances, maybe because they’re ephemeral, because of the tension they create, and the contact with the audience. Beyond ergonomics, and overcoming technical limitations, what's most interes-ting about working in real time is that we maintain the human dimension of our creation. Of course we still use audiovisual controllers and software, but that’s not what’s fundamental.
We use that equipment, and we create all these tools and patches, in order to create expressive, synthesized universes. Actually, there are two different levels of real time creation. The first is closely related to music and is all about the ability to tell a story. At that level, real time is about the connections amongst the performers and/or various performance techniques. The combination of para¬meters involved is similar to those in performing arts. There's an introduction, there's a theme that you build upon, occasional breaches in the narration to create an element of surprise, and an ending. The second level is more based on the potential for machines/instruments to suggest and determine the shape of the project. When you work with a machine, that means knowing what that machine is capable of, and what it’s possible to get out of it. We've sometimes tried to find a very specific technical set-up, only to have to give it up because the right tools haven’t been created yet. In any case, esthetically, working in real time has to be esthetically worthwhile; it has to provide coherence and efficiency to the variations on the theme.
Your sources of inspiration are highly varied, and include works such as Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault’s "Les Champs Magnetiques", Anselm Kieffer’s "Seven Heavenly Palaces" for "Op 7", the Paul Peach Quartet for "Hemline"…
Each of those authors are different from each other, of course, but they share a certain conception of the universal. That's how we saw it, anyway. There are others, as well, that you haven't mentioned, artists that are more contemporary and just as important. Pan Sonic, for example, for whom the universal is, similarly, a priority. We were honored to produce visuals for them at Reggio Emilia in 2007. There was no way we could ignore the fantastic black, square oscilloscope set against a solid white line that they’ve been using in their live shows since the middle of the 90s. Just as we couldn’t forget the black square on white background that Kazimir Malevitch uses in his painting Tabula Rasa. When Dies (Fabio Volpi, a member of the collective) started working on that visual, the only possible approach was to try to capture the various viewpoints of the black, square oscilliscopic shape. Then Orgone (Bertram Niessen, another member) connected an AV patch on order to work in real time, using settings that controlled the flickers, the blurred edges, the cinetic set-up, etc. I loved that patch. But we never used it again.
You also customize musical instruments, as you did for the Videomoog project…
Videomoog 3.0 isn’t a customized tool. It was invented by Peppo Lasagne, who has developed a number of audiovisual synthesizer prototypes. It was developed by Otolab for the Netmage festival. We won the top prize in 2002, and we had to come back the following year with an audiovisual project. So we invested in a hardware project. The videomoog is an AV synthesizer made up of three separate units. It mixes the three video signals on a single screen, and the audio signals on a stereo output device. It’s completely analogical, with no memory for either presets or user specifications.
I was lucky enough to attend the "OP 7" performance at the Elektra festival in Montreal. Its powerful 3D graphics and its immersive ambiance, structured around a perpetually evolving hypnotic tunnel, were extremely impressive. How did you go about designing such an exemplary piece of penetrating virtual exploration?
Spring 2006, Marco Mancuso (Digicult) asked us to develop a new live audiovisual project for the Mixedmedia festival, which was going to take place in Milan at the Bicocca Hangar. Anselm Kieffer’s amazing sculptures, the Seven Heavenly Palaces, are located in that hangar. They’re scenographical, metaphysical, they border on the sacred. We didn’t want to touch the sculptures themselves, nor did we want to project anything onto them. We preferred to work with three screens, and stereo sound. We were inspired by the sacred feeling of the sculptures to imagine seven doors opening onto seven tunnels connected to infinity, each tunnel brimming with spirits. It’s the first time all nine of us were working simultaneously on the same stage! We had to lower the number of performers later, because no festival ever invites that many people together. There were three of us at Elektra.
Can you tell me about the other perfor¬mances you’re currently working on?
We’re currently working on Circo Ipnotico, Les Champs Magnétiques and Giardini Neri. For Circo Ipnotico, we’re using a mixed technique with two video projectors sitting on top of each other and two other devices we’ve invented ourselves. One of them, designed by FD, Tonylight and Peppo Lasagna, is called the psico¬scopio. The psicoscopio is an analogical machine, that creates optical chains using RGB LEDs that turn on and off at varying speeds. It's filmed by a camera, which sends a signal that is projected during the performance. The second invention is a DOS, which was designed by Peppo Lasagna. It creates round black and white chains which are transmitted to another projector. Giardini Neri is a kind of a dream garden which can be seen as a metaphor for the soul. I produced it in 2008 in Mexico City, then in Milan. Xo00 and Androsyn (Alessandro Minisci) worked on the visuals, while Dies, Scrub and myself worked on the sound. It’s a live performance that plays like a film, probably the most figurative of Otolab’s projects.
LAURENT CATALA
+ INFO:
< www.otolab.net >
Published in the Digitalarti Mag #1.
Digitalarti Mag, the international digital art and innovation magazine.
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