Gruppo Làbun @ Re:New

Gruppo Làbun, Italian media art and electronic music duo (Alessandro Perini and Stefano Fumagalli), will be installing the work "MuShRoom - Musical Sheets Room" at the Re:New festival, Copenhagen (DK), from May 19 to 23, 2008. The place is Huset i Magstræde, salon K.

Visit http://www.labun.it and http://www.re-new.dk for more infos.

[img]http://www.labun.it/Sito\%202007\%20-\%20materiale/Works/Installazioni/Mushroom/Immagini/Grandi/Mush\%2002\%20big.jpg[/img]

[size=11]The title is a tongue in cheek reference to John Cage’s great passion for mushrooms. In reality it is an acronym revealing the nature of the work itself, which is in fact an interactive room inside which a multitude of virtual sheets of paper fall from a big box suspended from the ceiling. This takes place thanks to the public who, in order to interact, has to throw small foam rubber balls at the box to make it swing.
Each sheet displays a photograph chosen from a constantly updated database, to which the visitor can himself contribute, by sending images via Bluetooth from their own mobile telephone.
The accumulation of virtual sheets on the floor creates a pile of paper which is constantly analysed itself, from an index, thus creating an envelope which controls part of the parameters applied to a sound source: a microphone which picks up, live, the external soundscape.
On this imaginary landscape, during the interactive moments, brief fragments of John Cage’s “Fontana Mix” - composed by the extraction of random lengths of tape from a large box - stand out.
Here, as was already the case with Cage’s famous piece entitled 4’33”, it is the public which determines the contents of the opera; moreover, the user participates in the definition of the form itself in a more or less conscious manner but, in any case, filtered by chance.[/size]