Alternating from 1 to x and vice versa

Abstract

Alighiero Boetti is one of the most representative contemporary Italian artist and his opus is raising a constantly growing international interest. Many of his works can be realized on very different supports and make use of algorithmic procedures. This paper presents a concert-performance for piano, five video projectors, real-time audio-video processing, an interactive chessboard, and involves a pianist, a director and two players. The multimedia event is directly related to a series of works by Boetti featuring a grid-filling algorithm which has been implemented by the artist on a huge variety of planar supports through many collective projects. In this sense, the event is intended to be another possible realization of the original work exploiting a multimodal support, i.e. including sound (music and audio processing) and emphasizing the generative process defined by Boetti's algorithm through interactivity. An analysis of a corpus of 50 realized Boetti's works - all based on the same algorithm - has been conducted in order to define meaningful mapping strategies from the visual domain to music and audio-video processing. The project makes use of a networked systems for real time DSP which is controlled by wooden cubes on an interactive chessboard.