KIBLA 15 years, AUDIO BALLERINAS, VIDEO PEACOCKS and other electro-acoustic clothes – Multimedia clothing performances on the city streets and squares

Benoît Maubrey is the director of DIE AUDIO GRUPPE, Berlin-based art group that build and perform with electronic clothes. Basically these are electro-acoustic clothes and dresses (equipped with amplifiers and loudspeakers) that make sounds by interacting thematically and acoustically with their environment. The AUDIO BALLERINAS use – among other electronic instruments – light sensors that enable them to produce sounds through the interaction of their movements and the surrounding light (PEEPER choreography). Via movement sensors they can also trigger electronic sounds that are subsequently choreographed – or “orchestrated”– into musical compositions as an “audio ballet” (YAMAHA choreography). A variety of other electronic instruments (mini-computers, samplers, contact microphones, cassette and MP3 players, and radio receivers) allow them to work with the sounds, surfaces, and topographies of the space around them in a variety of solo or group choreographies.
In the more recent AUDIO PEACOCKS project performers wear electroacoustic instruments shaped into a peacock’s fan-like plumage that is highly directional – projecting the sound into a space like an oversized radar dish. Much in the same way that the courtyard peacock “strutts his stuff” in front of a pea-hen and imposes with his awesome cry, so does the Audio Peacock stalk his architectural domain – using sound as a scalpel that cuts through air and sculpts it. An Audio Peacock can either amplify and alter its own voice or electronic instruments using a microphone, sampler, and filters (loop + pitch), play pre-recorded sounds, or receive sounds via transmitter/receiver. As VIDEO PEACOCK/ CYBER-BIRDS (wearing white plexiglass “skins”) these electroacoustic birds patrol a more limited space and darkened environment. Their audio costumes double as mobile projection screens: whenever their paths intersect the light of a video projector the costumes metamorphasize into multi-colored screens. Colorful visualizations (movies, pictures, internet blogs, computer-enhanced images and closed circuit camera views) are “beamed” onto them as they play their sounds. As a multi-phonic installation the parcours of these “cyber-birds” is choreographed vis-a-vis to the emplacement of the projectors in the architectural space.

For infos
www.benoitmaubrey.com
on VIMEO
Audio-Video Peacocks vimeo.com/12559421
CyberBirds vimeo.com/15524528

MMC KIBLA wishes to thank the following for their support: EU-EACEA, Culture Programme, Brussels, Slovenian Ministry of Culture, Municipality of Maribor and Office of Youth. KiBela programme is part of the European X-OP project.