Echo x echo
Performance for soprano, electronic music and robotic device, 2021
Syd Rey, Clémence Martel & Alessandro Ratoci
Additional artwork by Angelo Mucciante
Performed at Teatri del Suono Paradiso Festival 2021 / Per Dante Alighieri (Trieste, September 2021, curated by Cantierezero).
Performed in Stuttgart, January 2022 and Backnang, February 2022.
Work for soprano, electronic music and robotic arm.
Trieste 2021. Stuttgart 2022.
Collective work with Clémence Martel and Alessandro Ratoci.
Echo x echo mixes robotic art and contemporary music and examines how boundaries between human and machines are increasingly blurred in the context of posthumanism, taking the specific path of desire and its mediation through music: how is desire for the highly artificial posthuman body mediated by singing, by essence a genuinely organic activity? To what extent is singing the perfect mediator for re-embodying an augmented body?
We attach an exoskeleton made up of two robotic arms to lyric singer Clemence Martel and simultaneously we feed her voice to a transforming software. By letting spectators connect to the software with their smartphone, we allow the audience to take control of both the robot and the voice. As people compete for control, we challenge the animal-like, possibly tyrannic behavior that humans can exhibit when in groups and which can lead to careless appropriation of an alien body as if it were a pure object of desire. Conversely, we also investigate how organic and animal resonances of the singing voice can alter the collective behavior of the group by installing a layer of sexualization on top of the machine. By blurring the boundary between the singer and the machine, this layer provide the machine with an overcoat of organicity through the mechanism of sexualization.
The Verfremdung effect triggered by the prothesis (and which is somehow reminiscent of the Uncanny Valley concept by cybernetician Masahiro Mory) installs a complex interaction between the hybridized robot-singer creature and the audience, whereby the latter no longer precisely knows if the thing it controls is a purely human being or a pristine machine, being inevitably confronted with ethical issues. In the interplay between the materiality of the robot and the immateriality of the otherness, the figure of the monster is thus paramount, as is that of attraction, perversion and ambivalence. From the hypersexualized figure of Lolita in the novel of Nabokov to the potentially perverse behavior of spectators when in groups, this makes our work sit somewhere between En Echo, for soprano and electronics (1993-1994) by composer Philippe Manoury and “Rhythm 0” (1974) by Marina Abramovic. In effect, our performance pays tribute to both in an attempt to fully combine ideas from performance and new music.
Our experimental setup is made up of 4 loudspeakers that can act as a quadriphonic system for precise sound localization, an exoskeleton and a set of electronic devices that can control it and our own dedicated Wi-Fi router for control by the audience. Spectators simply connect to a dedicated website to start controlling the performance.
