By Kimberly Caterino
The Interactive portion of South by Southwest (SXSW) has gained tremendous popularity, but this being Austin, even Interactive events include live music. Plutopia Productions, an experiential events and entertainment production company here in Austin, hosted its 4th annual signature SXSW Interactive event: The Future of Play. Plutopia’s mission is to bring arts, entertainment, and technology together, to discover what can work in the future, to be playful, to appeal to all ages.
The Mexican American Cultural Center was a great venue for the evening’s festivities, with several themed buildings, rooms, and hallways of all sizes, and an outdoor area for extended romping. Experiments, demonstrations, interactive games, and artistic displays lined the walkways— and plenty of chances to create art as an active participant—with paint, objects, computers, light, sound-- oftentimes with more than one of those combined.
Attended by all ages of folks, from the casual to the costumed, there was in fact an invitation to play—usually with something colorful, tactile, and futuristic-looking-- at the turn of every corner. And those men in black, the secret service guys with the attaché-cases? Until the rotary telephone popped out, they had me fooled. But the mad scientists in the white lab coats—they might have been for real.
The headlining event was a performance by Text of Light, an improvisational group from New York City (also the name of a 1974 Stan Brakhage film). Text of Light features Sonic Youth’s guitarist Lee Ranaldo, Alan Licht (guitars and devices), Tim Barnes (percussion), and Ulrich Krieger (saxophone and electronics).. there are also turntable-spinning members who were not present this evening. Together the group creates improvised compositions alongside avant-garde films, primarily those of Stan Brakhage (although they include other filmmakers at times). Important note: the players do not watch the film while they compose—they admittedly do not play “at” the film. Knowing this in advance (from the press conference) made for an eerily synchronistic experience for this one audience member.
Renaldo stated the group has developed a language together, clearly not a standard band-like formulaic one, and they use different films for each performance—unscreened in advance. Part of the goal is to create juxtaposition, to induce different synaptic interactions (for players, for listeners) during the experience. I had the opportunity to ask if the group members approach their events with a particular artistic mission in mind, what is their conversation like as a group after performing, and what kinds of reflections do they have prior to or after their performances? When does it fail; when does it rock?
All 4 members took turns answering my layered question, completing and complementing each other’s thoughts: One primary goal is to turn art aficionados on to Stan Brakhage’s work. Text of Light aims to create synergy, to generate the unplanned, to be in the moment as possible. The overall encounter is more than the sum of the parts, and the only times they vaguely deem a performance a failure is when there’s a basic failure in technology.
While playing, they stop to hear the sound that is still going, and enter a group mind. “Making music is playing,” Ranaldo emphasized, and it is simultaneously “serious and playful”. Wrapping up the group-mind answer, Tim Barnes added: “And it does rock.”
I hesitate to use the word “performance”—perhaps “experiment” fits. What was the experiment like? Dark, with most spectators sitting Indian-style on the floor. The screen was up front, with the 4 musicians on a stage, their backs to the screen. There was no formal opening announcement—just an entering... of an altered mind state. If you can imagine a hallucinogenic experience induced by only sound and images.. The “group mind” was not limited to the people on the stage, I soon realized. It only got deeper as time went on.
Brakhage’s work is a blur of moving colors and images, unfocused objects, with close-ups, movement, flickering hues (in the beginning, red, and orange) and plays on perspective. You never quite know what you are looking at, and you forget you are watching a film—especially with the sound wrapping around. The instruments that I could detect being used were a saxophone, drums, guitar, but not all at once..
Speaking of synaptic interactions: Cello bow on a guitar. Cacophony, silence. Distorted feedback, silence. Alarms, felt in the floor, grabbed my (musician) earplugs.. Synthesized loops. Crescendos, lulls. screeches, and wandering. Kinetic fear, threat, chaos. Frenetic drums, circular squeaking, a cell phone on a guitar. Jazz, and here is Miles Davis: peace. Mourning, and a military march. “Panels for the Walls of Heaven”—blue, choppy, ambient saxophone, bellows and howls from guitars. Speed, movement—discovery!
Undoubtedly—play leads to discovery. Perhaps the group’s mission, perhaps Plutopia’s mission.
No segment of the Text of Light’s experiment is a repeat of the moment before, and clearly listeners are out of a certain comfort zone. Because the group members are centralized on a stage in front of a screen, the sound and images serve as a vacillating invitation and dare, to draw near. The closer you get, the less the individual parts make sense.. the more you are forced to let go, to accept the moment, and the less it matters —like an impressionistic painting.
I can always go back to my comfort zone, but Text of Light sure reminded me of how important it is to leave!
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