bresciani - [sh[i]e[l]d]

[sh[i]e[l]d]

[sh[i]e[l]d], by lixt, is an audio visual live coding performance focused on information, noise and video feedback. A way to address the power and misuse of the mass media industry which delivers tons of speculative and click bait information to the public causing an endemic vulnerability of social and political understanding and opening space for the fake news industry to thrive. How to protect ourselves from this standardized medium? How to defend our autonomy, free thinking and diversity of viewpoints if the information we consume from the supposedly trustable sources is biased and money driven?

This project does not gives answers but tries to raise questions while uses the homepage of well-known newspapers as an arena for debate, creativity and play, neutralizing its imposing aesthetics. The local side live coding manipulation of the web page through the browser console (by inserting JavaScript and CSS code) is blended with musical live coding environment (Sonic Pi, TidalCycles, ThrenoScope) through the use of Hydra. The result is a noisy, glitched performance which plays around with information (text and image), grid and design of the newspapers front page.

Against the shedding of our sanity
And the shadiness of our conscience
A shield for the mind
A shed for the soul

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

lixt is my research’s documented path through the use of live
coding as a medium for artistic expression in the digital age. In the historical moment where human living experience is more and more mediated by digital and computational environments, I have turned my attention to the relevance of language, contrasting the thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Vilém Flusser with the contemporary dilemma of aesthetics and the structure of our society. Here, the efforts are to better understand and discuss the characteristics and consequences of the massive interaction between man and machine to identify the changing of what we perceive as real.

When I read Flusser’s first book (Language and Reality, 1963) it was a blast in my mind. His idea of revisioning Wittgenstein’s theory of the logical structure of language as a limit to our reality changed my life. To Flusser, not only “the limit of language is the limit of the world” (Wittgenstein, 1921) but the world, what we consider real, is a product of language. “Language is what transform chaos in cosmos”, he wrote.

Considering he is right, if we change our language, we produce a different reality. That was the starting point of my research about how the massive interaction between man and the digital realm is reshaping our language and, therefore, our world. And lixt is the practice side of this research, an experimental playground created to expose the chaotic moment we are facing in the contemporary crisis of language.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CtrlReturn Festival 2024 - C-Base - Berlin (DE)
VIU Festival 2024 - Phonos Lab - Barcelona (ES)
Drastic Noise - Circolo Arci Canaletto - La Spezia (IT)
INACT Fest 2023 - Théâtre de Hautepierre - Strasbourg (FR)
Tutte le Macchine al Potere - SECS Gallery - Carrara (IT)
Algorave - LSOA Buridda - Genova (IT)