escalating inter-activity:  brieftopic glimpse in site-specific post-human improvised music

Barbierato Leonardo

There are moments within a performance where destruction and deviation from reality allow an alternative scenario to reveal itself. I argue that these moments can be called ‘brieftopic’, fleeting glimpses into a possible future (Behzad Khosravi Noori, 2024). But what are the connections between reality, deviation and alternative scenario? How can this brieftopia, which materializes for brief moments within a performative event, reverberate outside of it, propagating at a social and political level? During the site-specific improvisation series [in situ], it became evident to me that this brieftopia is tied to an artist’s relinquishment of control, leading to a decentralization of the performance. By introducing the case study, specifically the [in situ] performance held in September 2023 at the Maremma National Park, we will see how unforeseen, unpredictable, and non-linear interactions between myself, the audience, and the non-human components of the ecosystem in which we were immersed, shaped the performance itself, steering it in an unexpected direction and removing it from the continuum of artistic intention, audience perception, and everyday life reflection. In this brieftopia, in a sense, it is existence itself that is reduced to rubble, not for the love of rubble, but for the way out that passes through it, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin.

performance

As can be seen in video, which is a brief excerpt from this performance, the brieftopia develops on two simultaneous levels:

back

1) The aesthetic conception of improvisation performances is destroyed and reoriented in different terms. The instruments used by the participants are comparable to the instruments that the players use in John Cage’s previously mentioned works. The exploratory process of these instruments is unpredictable, both because the participants probably have not studied the sound of instruments such as pine cones, fans, and plastic bottles before, and because the electroacoustic chain is structured to have a high degree of randomness (for example, some elements like delay and glitch are designed to be random). This indeterminacy, which does not imply impersonality, is an integral part of the performance’s aesthetic. Also the feedback, typically considered undesirable acoustic feedback, here is not just a collateral effect of open miking on the audience and environment but a creative stimulus.

2) The presence of feedback highlights an issue I’d like to call ethical/relational: each element is responsible for the overall orientation of the performative system, just as every living and non-living element is responsible for the health of the ecosystem in which it operates. The management of acoustic feedback is controlled by me and the audience member who moves closer to or farther from the microphone, adjusting their intentions based on the feedback they trigger. The participant at the end of the video intends to interact with beat-boxing, but the feedback caused by being too close to the microphone leads him to move away, lower the dynamics, and ultimately re-orient his intervention. Moreover, non-human elements can cause feedback and have the potential to redirect the performance. In the first part of the video, the wind and some birds near the mic 2 are the main actants.

feedback as a creative stimolus

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