DeConcert

DesConcerto (disconcert) is a project developed in the intersection of visual arts and music. It was created for the series Music, Technology and Multimedia, presented at Cultural Space Sérgio Porto, in September, 11th 2003. For this project I designed a dynamic system that operated as meta-language in relation to the structure of "a concert" in terms of its public, the places were it usually happens, official versus non-official circuits. It investigates how the places are shaped by their use and how this influences people¹s behavior. The idea was to bring the streets inside the theater and vice-versa and to provoke collapses of time and space.

Three layers of time were put together in the same space of the cultural center: the real time of the event, the same place in a concert one week before and takes from the cities of New York and London in 1998 and 1999. All the ground level area of the cultural center was occupied by the proposition. At the entrance door, outside facing the street, loud-speakers spread the sound produced inside the theater. At the hall and at the bar TV monitors showed the images processed inside the theater and thare was a camera nad microphones to capture sound and image to feed the system. In the theater 4 video-projections mixed real-time images with pre-recorded ones creating a fluid architecture inhabited by other publics as well as by the public of the event. In the small gallery a compacted structure underlines the main concept of DesConcerto: the tiny line that separates spectacle and real life in contemporaneity.

It was a place to be seen in movement. It could also be thought of as expanded-cinema (Weibel, Shaw). The narrative shows people in transit in the cities, the streets, the subways, always walking, in lines, and from time to time one could see musicians playing in the streets, subways, plazas, etc. It starts with a public concert of Philip Glass, an African musician in the old square of the World Trade Center, followed by a presentation of natives from South Dakota. From this nucleous the story fragments in several micro events. I called "Art is the center of the real world" to the video material produced for DesConcerto.