simas

„There was no doubt that the road was slowly rising, and the silhouette of the horizon seemed much higher in the sky. The road began to twist, and suddenly he was aware of great rocks on either side of him. Soon only a narrow ribbon of sky was still visible, and the darkness became, if possible, even more intense.“ – Arthur C. Clarke, A Walk in the Dark

Simas is an immersive audiovisual performance with a duration of 35 – 45 minutes. It is substantially based on the science fiction short story ‘A Walk in the Dark’ by Arthur C. Clarke and transformations of it. Concrete, generated and transformed sounds are composed, arranged and manipulated in real time in order to create a psychosonic experience from which it is difficult to tear oneself away. Sounds and visual content are referring to humanoid and technological artifacts of the last and the current century but let the audience project their own imagination onto it. Noise algorithms are being considered as the golden ratio of the digital age.

The visual side is strongly connected to the audio and vice versa via technological and metaphorical relations. The aim is to provide an audiovisual environment in which sensation, feeling, thinking and intuition are forming a perceptual entity. The immersive character of the performance can be achieved best in a professional presentation environment with multiple screens and an appropriate sound-system.

Simas is settled in the concept of dromology (Virilio) and more specifically referring to the ‘field effect’ which is created by real time perspectives of telecommunications. The consequence of this effect is the destruction of the time-continuum. Teleaction takes over as the perceptual presence of the digital world. Time is condensed into the zone of the present much like a type of black hole that refuses to allow the future or the past. Digital transformations on time-extracted media artifacts form a telepresence.

„Past, present and future – that old tripartite division of the time continuum – then cedes primacy to the immediacy of a tele-presence which is akin to a new type of relief. This is a relief not of the material thing, but of the event, in which the fourth dimension (that of time) suddenly substitutes for the third: the material volume loses its geometrical value as an ‘effective presence’ and yields to an audiovisual volume whose self-evident ‘tele-presence’ easily wins out over the nature of the facts.“ – Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb