Still from screen, Ryoichi Kurokawa 2007

Part of UBS Openings: The Long Weekend 2007

While the avant-garde movements of the modern period idealised the machine, mechanical dysfunction is now often a focus of artistic interest. In contemporary practices such as audio-visual performance and electronic music this strategy often involves a focus on the mechanical, electronic and material qualities of the instruments themselves, as well as the re-processing and transfer of the signals they produce.

This programme highlighted artists exploring the use of feedback, decay, assemblage and kinetics and focused on practices that make use of electronic, analogue and self-built instruments for the real-time creation, improvisation and manipulation of both sound and image.

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Ryoichi Kurokawa

Ryoichi Kurokawa destructs and reconstructs organic representation into abstraction. A minimal, yet chaotic conflux of visual and auditory perception merges into an experience of memory and ambiguity where virtual and actual images are no longer distinguishable. Kurokawa uses what he calls an ‘audiovisual organ’ to compose spatial-time sculptures out of digitally generated material, formed from analogue field recordings. Abstract sound and imagery are perfectly synchronised, asserting a form of glitch minimalism re-assembled into complex and highly rhythmic audio-visual landscapes. Kurokawa accepts sound and imagery as a single unit, constructing precise and exquisite computer-based works that demonstrate a unique audio-visual language.

AVVA - Toshimaru Nakamura and Billy Roisz

 AVVA is the duo of Toshimaru Nakamura and Billy Roisz. AVVA stands for ‘Audio Video/Video Audio’, referring to the working method of the duo. For their performance at Tate Modern, AVVA performed a live improvisation, under the title of Nemu. Nakamura producing music using the internal feedback from his no-input mixing board; its musical inner workings exposed and stripped bare by recursive feedback loops. This is input intoRoisz’s video mixer and becomes a source for its generated imagery. Between reduced sound, a skeletal rhythm and an extensively emptied picture.

Sachiko M with Benedict Drew

Sachiko M and Benedict Drew punctuated the evening with precise, uncluttered simplicity – an open-ended improvisational strategy that amplified the stark industrial environment of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, making visible the process of live interaction through the real-time shaping of time-based ‘sculptural’ elements – a non-cinematic, audio-visual score involving kinetic imagery and pure sine wave.