Michelle Agnes Magalhaes with Frédéric Bevilacqua and Benjamin Matuszewski
The Constella(c)tions project was proposed by composer Michelle Agnes Magalhaes in response to the third STARTS residency call. The residence proposal was to experiment with collective musical interactions, using gestures and bodily actions. The composer’s artistic vision was of shifting towards novel paradigms for musical composition and scores through a series of collective “games” whose rules implied texts, visuals, objects in spaces.
This was matching particularly well with the web-based ecosystem that the ISMM team of ICAM has developed to create embodied collective interaction with media, and particularly with sound and music. In particular, the ISMM team develop technological environment to support artistic use cases of collective interaction. Among our research questions was: how to support and/or question human/human interaction through the mediation of web technologies and embedded motion sensors.
This use of technology seeks to find an alternative between high-tech and low-tech approaches, by building on top of consumer grade and widely spread technologies, an approach we might call everyday-tech or “mid-tech”. As such, the project aims at proposing novel artistic and expressive paths that enable to include the audience by hijacking tools they are familiar with, and expose the bricolage4 of the scientific, technologic and artistic research to better blend the audience, context and artwork.
Therefore, in Constella(c)tions, the main tool for playing sounds is the motion sensors embedded in smartphones, which are manipulated by the public and by the performers. They permit to trigger and modify sounds according to body gestures and movements. The performance is built from the coexistence between the performers, composer and creators, musician-researcher and audience. The scenography, architecture, stage and musical space are designed as a continuum, as a set of connections between objects and people, that have musical roles through motion detectors.