on music and beauty

Tag: AGON

Intercos


In 2000 AGON invited me to compose the music and sound effects for a six-room interactive installation to be realised at Bologna’s COSMOPROF international cosmetics fair. Intercos, the company that commissioned the installation, wanted to create an immersive environment around a specific narrative.
Memory, Garden, Irony, Seduction, Laziness and Future were the six themes, one for each room.

The music I wrote consisted in six loops of the same length, one for each room. The sense of continuity was given by a common harmonic structure shared by all the loops, while rhythms and instrumentation were very different, according to the room’s theme. Various models of interaction were implemented in the installation, the most interesting one being the Future room, were the movement of the hands of the visitors affected both the visuals projected on the facing wall and the sounds being diffused by the loudspeakers.

I collaborated on this installation project with Michele Tadini, Paolo Solcia and Andrea Taglia from AGON.

Lips Eyes Bang

In June 2005 I invited to Birmingham Conservatoire the Italian composer Luca Francesconi. We performed his multimedia work, Lips Eyes Bang, in a Thallein Ensemble concert conducted by Lionel Friend. The actress-singer role in Lips was given to Abigail Kelly, a very gifted vocal student with superior dramatic skills. Luca gave also some master classes and two talks on his music.

In order to make the performance possible, in collaboration with AGON – the Milan production and research centre – in February 2005 we started to migrate the original live video setup of the piece to a different software environment: from Image/ine to Jitter, a suite of video manipulation objects for the Max/MSP software environment.

Jonathan Green went to Milan in April 2005 to work with Paolo Solcia and the composer at AGON studios. Back in Birmingham he finished the porting of the software in time for the June performance. We were able to rehearse the piece and put together the final performance thanks to the generous support offered by Gregory Sporton, Director of the VRU (Visualisation Research Unit) at BIAD, the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design.