Absence

Absence is a performance for audio–visual concatenative synthesis elaborated during Diemo Schwarz's art–science residency at the IMéRA Institute for Advanced Study in 2022. It explores several notions of absence: of light, of love, of humanity, where societies and all human artefacts will be destructured to gradually disappear within the materials and textures of the natural world. Audio–visual concatenative synthesis extends the principle of corpus-based sound synthesis to the visual domain, where, in addition to the sound corpus (i.e. a collection of segments of recorded sound with a perceptual description of their sound character), the artist uses a corpus of still images with perceptual description (colour, texture, brightness, entropy, and other content-based image descriptors). The artist then creates an audio–visual musical performance by navigating through one of these descriptor spaces, e.g. through the collection of sound grains in a space of perceptual audio descriptors, and at the same time through the other descriptor space, i.e. select images from the visual corpus for rendering, and thus navigate in parallel through both corpora interactively with gestural control via movement sensors. This will evoke an aesthetic of acoustic and visual collage or cut-up, generating an audio–visual sequence of similar sounds/images from the two corpora when navigation is local, and opposing contrasting sounds/images when the navigation jumps to different parts of the linked sound/image descriptor space. The artistic–technological question that is explored here is how to control at the same time the navigation through the audio and the image descriptor spaces with gesture sensors, i.e. how to link the gesture sensing to both the image descriptors and the sound descriptors in order to create a multi-modal audio–visual performance.