MAO evenings :: Brian Mackern - Soundtoys Remixed [1996-2008] :: April 11, 2008; 6 - 8 pm :: Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Via Settembrini, 79 Naples.

Soundtoys Remixed, the title of the performance that Mackern will offer to the MADRE audience, will deal with Net surfing and (real-time) remix of 40 of his soundtoys developed between 1997 and 2007. Mackernian visions will flow through the (real-time) projection on three different screens, while the surrounding sounds will hold the audience in a synesthetic embrace that will shake new reflections about the increasingly more hybrid nature of the reality we face everyday.

SOUNDTOYS / AUDIOVISUAL INTERFACES

“… Just listen to your eyes.”
Wim Wenders, Once

Brian Mackern was born in 1962 in Montevideo (Uruguay) and after technical college he started to explore the potentials, mainly sound-related, of the Web. In 1997 he became the director of Artefactos Virtuales #1, one of the first latin-american web spaces about the research and the development of Net Art projects, while in recent years he appeared among the creators of Netart_latino #2, a database whose aim was of both documenting the work of south-american netartists, and building a link between their various experiences, that risked to remain isolated in a continent that tends to keep its artists attempts “unincorporated” #3.

The sense of belonging to a specific culture and the bond with the roots are a key element to the work of Mackern. Central from this point of view is the reinterpretation of the so-called “Tormenta de Santa Rosa”. The worship of Santa Rosa from Lima in the Rio de la Plata area is celebrated in the last days of August, when the place is hit by frequent floods and big rains. These natural phenomena are associated, in the popular belief, to the presence of the Saint, and Mackern provides a personal reading of the cult in his project 34s56w.org #4.

Mackern works have been presented in biennals, festivals and exhibitions at the four corners of the world (Uruguay, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Poland, Korea, etc.) and he was also prized with many awards in the above mentioned countries in over 10 years of artistic activity.

Brian Mackern is definitely an artist of the Net generation and his research is to be collocated within the tradition linked to some creative experimentations about the relationship between audio and visual objects (think about the vanguards of 1900), but it is now, in the Web, that it finds its best ground to get - finally ? depth and visibility. Thanks to the opportunities introduced by new digital tools, the dialectic tension between sounds and images has become object of endless reflections and investigations, all connected to the process of spreading of new cultural paradigms. Among them — above all — self-consciousness and self-sufficient life of the digital objects.

Within this frame, soundtoys is the personal answer of Mackern the artist to his need to find new ways of mediation between sounds and images. Every soundtoy, pure minimal meaning unit, can be remixed to others, paving the way to a complexity that, by perpetually multiplying the combination chances, becomes almost impossible to be seen as finite and leaves to the observer the task to complete the meaning of one among many possible trajectories.

#1 Artefactos virtuales experience developed from 1997 to 2002 ? http://www.internet.com.uy/vibri
#2 http://netart.org.uy/latino
#3 This is the way Alessadro Ludovico talks about Brian Mackern in an article for the austian magazine Spingerin [Noise at Margin - http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1667&lang=en]
#4 http://34s56w.org

text by Vito Campanelli - translation by Francesco Bordo

Media partner:
Neural - www.neural.it

In collaboration with:
Supportico Lopez - www.supporticolopez.com
Interferenze Festival - www.interferenze.org