Ex Klangst Schwartz Swan
Ex Klangst Schwartz Swan is a collaborative project conceived and live performed by new media artists Ioann Maria and Marco Donnarumma.
XKSS play augmented musical instruments transforming its natural sound in unexpected realm of sounds, noises and voices. The composition is nervous, disrespectful, screaming for attention, melting down the different influences of the duo, inspired by the masterworks of Beethoven and Mozart, the avant-garde studies of John Cage, Giacinto Scelsi and the DIY ethic of DNA and Sonic Youth.
The artists interact between themselves thanks to a local network which they use to exchange data about audio-video real-time processing, building dynamic narrative structure.
The sound and the images – processed exclusively live, no playback – react in real-time to the gesture and the score artists play, creating synesthetic performative act where technology disappears to leave space for human emotions and body language.
The video projection gives a blend of drawing animation and video recordings focusing on details, building a specific structure of the space – sequences full-filling the frame with its multi images arrangement in contrast with single object narration. The color becomes a tool for analyzing each different part of the story.
The visual aesthetics focus on the symbolism of mime, movements and contortions of the human body, describing a social organism as a metaphor of the games of society and its absurdity.
Quiet and simple, hard and violent, the growing tension of existence.
The engine of the performance is the action on musical instruments and its inseparable connection with video.
Thanks to the software C::NTR::L, a FLOSS Human Computer Interface developed in Pure Data by Donnarumma which exploits the physical computing technology – artists transform their unmodified musical instruments into augmented audio-visual tools.
Ex Klangst Schwartz Swan is not meant to be classified as any genre type, does not mind to
analize any common content, does not create and compose inside of the written rules.
Ex Klangst Schwartz Swan does not compromise its feelings with gifts of technology, but
express them freely playing with its instruments, voices and images.
Far from the stereotype of the idilliac plastic abstract landscape of generative art and glitch
music, far from the infrastructures of MIDI technology and sadistic laptops who make us slaves of the technology we create, forgetting the common sense of °audio-visual° and °live media°, we just perform, we act – inside of the sound, inside of the image. Technology is our tool, not our status symbol.
Ex Klangst Schwartz Swan – Klangst by ioann maria
Ioann Maria: augmented piano, voice, trumpet, live electronics, live video
Marco Donnarumma: augmented electric bass guitar, noises, live electronics, live video