Sensible 2.0 Text Ecosystem - (2008)

Sensible 2.0 Text Ecosystem is an interactive installation in which text messages sent by the audience became organism(part of virtual ecosystem)that eat, multiply and die, making new text messages.

+ Authors: Emiliano Causa, Tarcisio Lucas Pirotta y Matías Romero Costas
Collaborators:Diego Campana / Matías Cardacce / Gastón Santoriani

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Sobra la Falta (2008)

Sobra la falta is an installation with a robot “cartonero” (like a homeless or people who pickup garbage) tries to “create” images using the garbage that people throw.

+ Authors: Emiliano Causa, Tarcisio Lucas Pirotta y Matías Romero Costas, Diego Rusjan

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Sensible (2007)

Sensible is an interactive installation provided with a sensible touch-screen which allows people to control a virtual environment and from this action produce real time music. In accordance with the different kind of interventions participants make, artificial life algorithms, virtual environments develop producing simultaneously different musical ambiances.

+ Authors: Emiliano Causa, Tarcisio Lucas Pirotta y Matías Romero Costas.
Colaborators: José Valenti, Diego Alberti, David Bedoian, Andrea Sosa, Laura Maiori, Ezequiel Causa

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Criaturas Efímeras - Ephemeral creatures (2006)

"Criaturas efímeras" is a performance of musical improvisation and real time sound and artificial life processing. In this work two instrumentalists (a sax and a vibraphone) do an improvisation taking a structural sketch as their starting point. While the music develops, two operators process in real time the sound produced by the instruments (with software specially programmed for this work), generating a third instrument (virtual) which accompanies the other two. Simultaneously, another operator controls the development of virtual creatures, which are projected on a screen in the stage, by means of another software tool designed for the performance.

+ info: Video

Performers: Pablo Ledesma (sax), Pablo Rivas (vibraphone), Matías Romero Costas (digital sound), Tarcisio Pirotta (digital sound) y Emiliano Causa (artificial life).
Authors: Emiliano Causa, Tarcisio Lucas Pirotta y Matías Romero Costas.

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Tango Virus - Virus Tango (2005)

Video | Picture Gallery | Tachnical Information

“Tango Virus” is an interactive installation that allows the audience to modify a tango song (Astor Piazzola's) in real time by means of a viral process. In the installation, the audience can dance the tango song they are listening to, but the dance becomes a viral behavior that attacks the song, making it vary and probably causing its “death”.

The audience enters a dark place where can only be seen two video projections and a space illuminated in zenithal shape. Once the audience decides to dance in the illuminated space, the movements (captured by a camera on the roof) generate a visual pattern in one of the projections, such pattern transforms into a virus that attacks the song. As a result, the pattern generated by the dancing trace can be seen in the projections and also the way in which this pattern, turned into virus, attacks and infects the song. The song undergoes changes every time more radical and violent. After this, two things might happen: the song manages to defend itself against the virus with its immune system, acquiring antibodies against this kind of virus (i.e. it becomes immune to similar patterns), or if the song is attacked by several virus and it cannot recover from these foreign bodies´ attacks, it later collapses and dies.

The installation aims to explore the audience participation in artistic creations resulting from a destructive process (like the viral process). It is said we have tango in our blood and “we will now infect the tango's body.” Music is probably one of the sensory phenomena that has the greatest influence on our body, hence the phrase “ears have no eyelids”, which shows we have no protection against sound and it can even invade and hurt us. Our aim is to reverse this relation, instead of the body moving to the beat of the music, we seek music to be altered by the movement of the body. This generates a vicious circle since our body continues being influenced by the music and therefore, when the music is modified by the body, a closed circle is entered into in which both elements reverberate from their own and mutual evolutions. The choice of tango as the style of music for this work is neither motivated by our personal taste (we are fond of tango but we are not devoted listeners) nor by a desire to extol our local culture (which could be regarded as an advertising attempt), it is due to the fact that tango exhibits in its dance an extraordinary form of improvisation, indispensable for this experience. Tango dancers improvise from a set of basic figures which link together and form something that could almost be called a grammar. The richness of its figures, added to the fact that the man and woman's steps complement perfectly (though they are very different), make tango one of the most highly developed, complex, and rich partner dances in the world. In this sense, tango is an improvisation practice that permits the generation of an endless number of patterns, making it impossible to find two identical ways of dancing it. We considered it appropriate to incorporate this choreographic richness in the creation of a virtual organism able to modify the tango song itself.

Besides, the installation seeks to perpetuate an ephemeral fact (like dancing) by the creation of a self-organizational entity (like a virus), enabling the dance to transcend the person and to evolve in an independent way. This produces a change in the position of the body in the dancing fact; one may think music becomes dance through the body, but this work allows music and dance to enter into a personal dialogue, leaving the body aside, giving to the dance, at the same time, an existence of its own. There is no better way of paying homage to tango than by making it possible to transform its dance in a way of living of its own.

Finally, we have chosen songs of the composer Astor Piazzola to pay tribute to his music, which we have enjoyed so much, and to his searching and tireless breaking spirit, which has given tango a new life.

+ info: Video | Picture Gallery | Technical Information

Authors: Emiliano Causa, Tarcisio Lucas Pirotta y Matías Romero Costas.

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Pitch Fractal - Varations about "Pitch Paint" of Golan Levin y Zach Lieberman- (2005)

“Pitch Fractal” is an interactive installation in which people can generate strokes (by singing) which generate fractal figures. In other words, a person can sing over the installation microphone, his singing generates strokes (in the projection) and once he finishes singing, the strokes generate fractal figures that repeat the motifs an endless number of times (though we know infinity does not exist in computers). We refer to Pitch Fractal as “variations over “Pitch Paint” from the Flong group” because our work has originated from reflections on the aforementioned work

“Pitch Paint” ( http://www.tnema.org/messa/messa.html )is part of a performance called “Messa di voce” created by Golan Levin and Zach Lieberman, in which a couple of professional singers draw their singing on the wall. Levin and Lieberman's work is of a great expressive richness and it succeeds in turning the fluent gesture of the singing into plastic figures drawn on a wall/canvas. When we became acquainted with this work, we thought it would be interesting to make those stokes generate fractal figures. Given most of the software for fractals come from equations and not from human gestures (which we consider to be a limitation); we thought that obtaining the seed of the fractal weave from a human gesture would be a new and enriching experience.

+ info: Authors: Emiliano Causa, Matias Romero Costas y Tarcisio Pirotta.

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Espejo espectral - Spectral Mirror (2004)

It is an interactive multimedia installation that generates sounds and image in real time according to the users' movements.

Spectral Mirror explores the audience reactions in front of a virtual mirror, in which (in contrast to a common mirror) the user can modify his own reflection and create different sounds, having his own body, gestures, and movements as the only interface.

The installation can be divided into three important elements, an input device (a USB camera that functions as movement sensor), a processing device (a CPU that captures the video signal and, by means of two software, processes the image and generates sound), and finally the output devices (two powered loud-speakers and a screen, through which the CPU sends audio and video signals)

Technically, the nucleus of the installation is in software, two specially designed algorithms, one for the image process and the other for the sound generation and process.

The software that processes the image captures the signal, cuts out the user's figure and with it it makes two things: uses the image for the graphic generation of the mirror, and processes the image information (size, position, and movement) for the generation of different effects. For example, the color changes according to the user's position, and the same happens with the sound. All this data is sent to the second algorithm (in charge of the sound), which makes something similar; it establishes different sounds according to the user's position, whose tone and volume are modified at the same time according to the user's movement and distance.

The aim of this project is to discover how is the interaction each user establishes with their own body through a combination of image and sound.

+ info: Video | Presentations | Authors: Emiliano Causa, Tarcisio Pirotta y Matias Romero Costas

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Jungla 0.1 - Jungle 0.1 (2004)

It is an interactive multimedia installation oriented to children. The work aims to recreate a virtual jungle, which children can search and explore, experiencing different situations typical of the environment. The installation has two centers of attention, one is given by the various sounds generated when going through the space, sounds typical of the jungle, and the other is a virtual feline, projected on one of the installation's walls, which reacts to the different sounds generated by the children 's movements, as well to their closeness or remoteness to the feline.

The feline's behavior is based in a logic that interweaves various states, actions, and reactions. The sounds produced when going through the installation have different meanings and effects, some of them may infuriate the feline, others frighten it, and others alert it. In this way, depending on the state of the feline in a particular moment it will react in a given way, changing its state and generating together with the future sounds a network of different behaviors that keep the feline alive and in action. The installation is made up of a scenographic structure consisting of two lateral panels that recreate the jungle environment, a set of tensors placed trough the two panels, which support a series of elastic lianas fixed to a curtain laid out on the floor, simulating the jungle's floor and hiding at the same time the pressure sensors, placed strategically on the space. The feline is projected on a screen which has movement sensors for the detection of the children's closeness to the animal.

The pressure and movement sensors are connected to a CPU which by means of software produces the different sounds. This algorithm not only makes this, it also analyses the character's situation and decides how it must react to different variables, such as the kids' closeness or the meaning of the sounds being produced. After analyzing this data, it sends the information to a second CPU, which is in charge of controlling the character's animation by means of a special algorithm of animation and effects in real time.

+ info: View 1 | View 2 | Video | Presentations | Autores: Emiliano Causa (direction, behavior design, interactivity nad sensors) , Rosana Barragán (production, character design , stage design), Tarcisio Pirotta (animation), Matias Romero Costas (sound design, behavior design, interactivity and sensors)

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Sobre Sonoridades - On Sonorities (2003)

It is an interactive multimedia installation that, with the audience intervention, randomly goes through extracts of the musical group Alternative Sonorities.

The installation basically consists of a series of pressure sensors placed on the floor where the installation develops; the sensors are hidden under a decorating fabric, which not only adds a visual esthetic touch but also prevents the sensors from being identified by the users.

The pressure sensors are connected via MIDI to a CPU, which sends the signals to the software that organizes the data and generates the different sound combinations.

Each sensor is assigned a series of sound loops. Every time the user presses a sensor the algorithm produces a loop, but the former never repeats the loop two consecutive times, it rather repeats it alternately within the associated series.

The loops are edited in a way they can be easily combined with each other, though they belong to different works and authors.

The idea is that every user could generate his own music, his own work from the different extracts, appropriating the group's work and recreating it in a new, unique, and unrepeatable work, according to his intervention in the installation.

+ info: Video | Presentations | Authors: Emiliano Causa (general design, spund edition -musical fragment of the group "Sonoridades Alternativas" - y programation), Rosana Barragán (visual art)

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Círculo y Cuadrado Performance - Circle and Square Performance (2003)

This performance is based on the video ¨Circle and square¨ and Pablo Ledesma's (sax soprano) and Pablo Rivas's (vibraphone) musical improvisation, it is a mixed electro acoustic work (for tape and instruments). ¨Circle and square¨ is an Op-Art exploration carried out by the artist Victor Vasarely, who generated a new esthetic and explored abstraction. Vasarely provided a new dimension to the plane and to the use of basic figures such as the circle and the square, creating in this way the illusion of volume and movement from plane figures, unrepeatable, depending on the user's intervention in the installation. In this work the use of those basic figures is exploited to the full, and at the same time a strong communion between image and sound is achieved, creating an abstract visual universe inhabited by optical illusions and permanent mutations.

+ info: Video | Performers: Pablo Ledesma (sax) and Pablo Rivas (vibraphon) | Authors: Matías Romero Costas (music and animation), Emiliano Causa (video direction, stage montage and animation), Tarcisio Pirotta (direction support, 2D and 3D animation), Leonardo Garay (3D animation), Andrea Sosa (audiovisual support).

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