The piece Convergence on which we have been working with the composer Alexander Schubert has been awarded with a Golden Nica at the 2021 ARS Electronica Festival ! 🤯🤯

convergence image

Quoted from the ARS ELECTRONICA website

The work Convergence by Alexander Schubert consists of a complex experimental arrangement in which a computer voice prompts the instrumentalists to perform certain activities in order to scan them. The process of scanning creates a digitally parameterized representation of the person and his activities in the computer, on the one hand only a part of reality, which can be manipulated and reassembled into a new representation. It is the game of all perception that Schubert presents here. In its process, reality is constantly distorted with new evaluations and artefacts. Artificial intelligences bring new forms of perception and representation of the human being into our reality through which our fluid idea of reality is unsettled. This poses a new question about our identity that arises in everyday human life through the mirroring of other people. The child experiences itself through the re-actions of the parents. The machine intervenes in this cycle of action and reaction with its own algorithms and becomes an even stronger counterpart to self-perception. Schubert translates this plot with his large team of developers, AI experts and the “Ensemble Resonanz” and the team of IRCAM into an exciting music-theatrical performance of about 30 minutes that triggers all levels of anxiety and fascination at the same time. The sounds and the musical material are clearly chosen in their message, very sign-like reduced, very expressive, almost super clean and exaggerated. He succeeds in organically integrating the instrumentalists into the action, but in the streaming version he exploits all the technical possibilities of visual and sonic augmentation. The consistent aesthetics, the dramatic power, the chosen concept and the skillful integration of all technical and aesthetic means led the jury to the decision to award the Golden Nica in the category of Digital Musics & Sound Art of Prix Ars Electronica 2021 to Alexander Schubert’s work Convergence.

There is also an interview made with ircam where we talk about the research part involved!

The piece itself can be watched here !