Plato’s bodies (feature-length)

ON LINE STREAM /PREMIERE

Saturday, 19 December 2020, at 20.00

YT Strip Core TV / FB Festival Svetlobna gverila &  Youtube/FB @LJUDMILA

About

The audio-visual performance in the industrial setting of the Old Power Station in Ljubljana is centred around an icosahedral object that summarises the shape and symbolism of the five Platonic solids representing the five elements. It was developed as an interactive AV installation for the Lighting Guerrilla festival.

Plato’s Bodies has now been remade as a performance. The entire surface of the object becomes a continuous whole – the audio-reactive and mapped projections of three visual artists are united; at the same time, their driving force is the sound of the performing musicians. The lighting elements forming the junctions of the projection surfaces are used both for dictating the colour of the projections with visual triggers and for illustrating the musical tempo.

Visual artists

BEAM TEAM (Stella Ivšek, Anja Romih) are new media artists focusing on live sound visualisation, animation, video production and scenography. As 5237 and SMECH, their VJ aliases, they have performed at various music and art festivals and events. In collaboration with the Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory, they curate the monthly meetings of “V2V”, a programme dedicated to video art and installations as well as visualisations to further the development in these fields and form intensive collaborations in the local creative community.

cute agression (Taja Štembergar) belongs to the younger generation of artists and is currently attending the Secondary School for Design and Photography in Ljubljana. She is focusing on digital art and VJ-ing. At this year’s MENT Festival she performed with the producer and DJ gl.ysten. She is also a member of the “V2V” community and a participant in the 2020 Lighting Guerrilla Laboratory.

knnz (Neža Knez) is currently completing her studies of video and new media art at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana. Her work is focused on multidisciplinary art and connects photography, CGI, animation and music, which she then presents in the form of video installations or VJ performances. These activities enable her to present otherwise two-dimensional works in new spatial dimensions. She is active in the meetings of the “V2V” community in the new media venue osmo/za (SI).

Mark Caserman is a creative graphic designer and animator. He is a media technician who revels in the details of projects; editing sound and video is his second nature. He says that he is constantly learning new programs and tricks that can be used in his projects. His research tools for the development and presentation of live visualisations have been presented multiple times within the V2V educational-performative platform.

Nibera (Bernarda Conič) completed her Master’s in visual communications at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana. She works in the field of visual creativity, analogue and digital photography, collage, graphic design, animation, and VJ. For her Master’s thesis, titled Hearing Color, Seeing Sound: The Relationship between Sound and Color, she created the Spectrozator, an interactive audio-visual installation.

TinyarVisuals (Tina Šulc Resnik) is a freelance video artist who graduated from visual communications at the Faculty of Design in Ljubljana. She works as a videographer and cameraperson. In her artistic endeavours, she focuses on nature imagery in a variety of forms of expression. Tina has worked on many different projects, mostly for theatres and festivals. Her artwork is exhibited internationally in galleries, museums, video festivals and as public art

Aleš Zupanc is an electronic device developer and programmer. He has worked for Dewesoft and Solvera Lynx and is currently a firmware developer at the PoLabs. He participated in the development of the interactive audio-visual installation Plato’s Bodies, for which he did the programming of light objects and created a special analogue interface that allowed the manipulation of these lights.

Musicians

TERRANIGMA has been present on the local music scene for over a decade. Under his most recent pseudonym, he returns to the past, to the beginnings of his creation and musical research, which is also reflected in his music production. He has released two EPs on the Slovenian netlabel and performed on numerous local and regional festivals and stages with his live and DJ sets.

Nitz has spent the last decade making music, performing and organising concerts, club nights and other special gatherings, such as his most recent string of live machine-jam sessions for select audiences called AmbientSoup, intended to spread and present ambient music and related culture. Machine-generated and with field recordings, his signature sound is fundamentally drawn from the finest ambient dub, techno, IDM heritage.

08080 (Jure Anžiček) is a musician/producer from Slovenia, active in various experimental music projects, who also performs solo with his live act. Using modular synths and relying on improvisation, he sculpts distorted, abrasive and harsh sonic soundscapes on the fringes of noise and techno. An explorer with a playful and inquisitive approach to loud electronic music.

Miroki Sound is Miroki’i’s main interest in life, due to its countless abilities and applications with which most people are still unfamiliar. With the discovery of the electronic scene in the late 90s, he started exploring music actively. From techno to progressive and experimental ambient music, his path has evolved from vinyl to cables and buttons. The sound image is complex yet very simple and can take you from one state to another, especially when you immerse yourself in it with all your being.

Credits

Concept, installation development and artistic direction: Stella Ivšek, Anja Romih LED electronics development and programming: Aleš Zupanc Visual artists: Mark Caserman, Bernarda Conič (Nibera), Stella Ivšek (BEAM TEAM), Neža Knez (knnz), Anja Romih (BEAM TEAM), Taja Štembergar (cute agression), Tina Šulc Resnik (TinyarVisuals) Musicians: Jure Anžiček, Luka Seliškar (08080), Miro Križman (Miroki’i), Črt Trkman (Terranigma), Tine Vrabič (Nitz) Video production: Adam Mulalić, Tadej Bavdek Video edit: Anja Romih, Stella Ivšek Audio technician & audio post production: Črt Trkman Acknowledgements: Luka Frelih, MB Grip

Production: Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory & Strip Core / Forum Ljubljana
Co-production: Bunker Institute, The Old Power Station – Elektro Ljubljana

Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the Municipality of Ljubljana – Department for Culture and the Ministry of Public Administration.
The project is part of the EASTN-DC Network, which is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.