We are utrumque (https://utrumque.com), an artistic duo working with room-scale acoustic feedback with electroacoustic and computational material intertwined to charge large spaces with a shared acoustic experience.
Our artistic practice is founded on an ecological stance with three themes: agency, sharing, and carefulness. Much music elevates ideas of virtuosic control, we instead search for dithering instabilities. We abandon the worldview where any system is fully knowable and forcibly controllable. Instead, we embrace a humble attitude in interaction with our systems. They are non-linear and exhibit chaotic behaviour where the smallest change can have huge consequences. Our systems are interesting to us precisely because they are superficially simple, yet impossible to fully grasp, they are deterministic, yet surprising and endlessly variating.
The rooms we perform in are part of our systems, acting as resonating bodies, sometimes sensitive to the smallest movement of anyone or anything in the space. All positions in the room are as valid a perspective as any other position, and it might not be the case that two listeners hear the same thing at the same time. Thus, the very acoustics we inhabit in order to listen becomes a shared ecology where the movement of anyone present might impact any other, or even all other, listeners in the space. Finally, sharing a fragile acoustic ecology with others has led us to a performance ethics of carefulness. Actions have consequences and care should be taken to mind the experience of others who have chosen to co-habitate with us, whether it is for a few seconds or several hours.
Gerhard Eckel
University of Music and Performing Arts Graz
Gerhard Eckel is an artist using sound to explore and articulate his relation to the environment he inhabits. He collaborates with Ludvig Elblaus as the duo utrumque, where they engage in a practice that fuses composition and performance through a shared methodology rooted in the exploration of complex systems.
Ludvig Elblaus
Artist and researcher
Ludvig Elblaus is an artist and researcher working primarily with computational materials to create electroacoustic music, as well as audio-visual installations, museum exhibits, and contributions to larger collaborative works in several traditions, e.g. opera, theatre, and dance.