It will happen here in Barcelona
Tindrà lloc aqui a Barcelona
Info
Presented at the exhibition La irrupció (the irruption) at the Santa Mònica arts center in Barcelona, Spain
June 9 – August 21, 2022
About
It will happen here in Barcelona / Tindrà lloc aquí a Barcelona is an immersive experience that reframes questions of sea-level rise, migration and extinction, in which familiar places — and the memories and dreams that attend them — are transformed by rising waters; the work gives rise to acts of recognition, utterance and transformation. Viewers travel along the marshlands and industrial wastelands of our local watershed and others worldwide that are shaped by industrialization. The sounds, images and text flow like waters, following a computer-code based system that gathers materials together in ever-changing experiences. Like ocean tides, the code-driven work is always changing. Roderick Coover’s images, gathered over the past decade from journeys on and around shorelines, combine with field recordings, voices and electronic music composed by Adam Vidiksis. Nick Montfort draws from Coover’s logs to create a continually evolving, poetic text.
The remarkable spectacle reveals forces of flow, floods and chemical contamination. Visitors plunge into the imaginaries of times present and future in a work that attempts to put into words the unspeakable threats posed to existence, time and belonging. Disruptions of language, spatial disorientation and fragmented media propel users to refigure history and give utterance to current crises. Written observations and images filmed at local industrial, post-industrial and natural sites are entered into the system to merge like images of other shores to intermingle histories, conditions and consequences as well as suggesting local differences. The music and sound design accentuate the collision of natural and industrial rhythms and the power of irrational forces, evoking imagined futures through dream-like sequences and by moving between surface and submerged realities and sentience. By compressing and distorting the scales of time that normally confound human imagination and undermine human action, the work opens possibilities for recognition, utterance, connection and action.
Details
Authors: Roderick Coover, Nick Montfort, Adam Vidiksis
Work: Through a spectacular confluence of algorithmic cinema, generative writing and electronic sound, It will happen here in Barcelona / Tindrà lloc aquí a Barcelona builds sentience and recognition of the impacts of rising waters on language, self and the senses of place.
Typology: Artworks
Theme: Algorithmic, Generative, Climate Change, Nonhuman, Installation
Artist Bios
Roderick Coover uses emerging forms to tackle questions of global warming, human rights, memory and the Anthropocene. The recipient of major awards from Fulbright, Mellon, Whiting, Adam Mickiewicz, APS, CHS and LEF, his works feature both in arts venues and public spaces from the Venice Biennale to the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Recent installations include The Floods (large-scale generative projection), Water On The Pier (locative, generative), The Key To Time (fulldome), Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project (VR/CAVE) and Toxi·City: A Climate Change Narrative (combinatory). Coover is Professor of Film & Media Arts at Temple University and lives in the USA and France.
Adam Vidiksis is a musician who explores social structures, science, and the intersection of humankind with the machines we build. Vidiksis’s music has won numerous awards and grants, including recognition from the Society of Composers, Inc., the American Composers Forum, New Music USA, National Endowment for the Arts, Chamber Music America, and ASCAP. His works are available through HoneyRock, EMPiRE, New Focus, PARMA, and SEAMUS Records. Vidiksis is Assistant Professor of music technology at Temple University, and president SPLICE Music. He performs in SPLICE Ensemble, Transonic Orchestra, Ensemble N_JP, and directs the Temple Composers Orchestra and BEEP.
Nick Montfort‘s computer-generated books of poetry include #!, Autopia, The Truelist, and Hard West Turn. He has collaborated on digital projects The Deletionist, Sea and Spar Between, and Renderings. Six of his books, collaborative and individual, have been published by the MIT Press, including The Future, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction and The New Media Reader. He is Professor of Digital Media at MIT, where he directs The Trope Tank, Professor II at the University of Bergen and a teacher at the School for Poetic Computation. Montfort lives in New York City.
