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In recent years, the world of contemporary creation has seen a growing interest in the most avant-garde audiovisual creations, which fuse the arts to create new organisms.
The eye. The dilated pupil. Color and sound. Music and perception. A green scream. A blue howl. Creation and art. We're talking about hybridity. This is the proposition of PLAYMODES, an audiovisual research studio where the raw materials of sound and image are explored, pressed and twisted to give birth to a new organism: visual music.
As Santi Vilanova, one of the members of PLAYMODES, explains: "We unify visual and sound language. We pursue an abstract language based on color and sound". For our four-person team, hybridity is consubstantial with the PLAYMODES project, a natural state: "We have hybrid profiles ourselves. One is a computer engineer (Eloi Maduell), another in telecommunications (Eduard Frigola), the third is an architect (Eduard Llorens) and I'm a graphic designer". However, they all share a passion for music, sound, art, visuals, software, abstraction, technologies, perception and algorithms. "We're interested in technological and scientific research, artistic expression".
VEUS - Live performance @ Premis Ciutat de Barcelona 2020 from Playmodes Studio on Vimeo.
Although the PLAYMODES proposal has a certain avant-garde spirit, Santi Vilanova humbly warns: "We haven't invented anything. We're part of a historical trend in visual music that began with the color organs of the 18th and 19th centuries, or with the first manifestations of visual cinema. I'm thinking of Oscar Fischinger and Norman McLaren, artists who understood that painting could have a kinetic dimension. We are heirs to all these elements. Kandinsky himself imagined his paintings as pictorial symphonies.
When Santi assesses the project's beginnings in 2008, he recalls what a risky gamble it was to create PLAYMODES, because at the time the visual music scene was in the minority and didn't attract the growing interest it does today. "The language of visual music wasn't very mature in our city (Barcelona)," he says. That's why Santi Vilanova applauds the efforts of MIRA FESTIVAL, which is committed to making avant-garde proposals visible, to raising awareness of unconventional audiovisual formats. With two editions already held in Berlin, MIRA FESTIVAL has been held annually in Barcelona since 2011, focusing on the intersection between art and digital culture. Its director, Oriol Pastor, also coordinates the digital arts degree at URL SALLE.
Cluster @ MIRA Festival. Barcelona 2016 from Playmodes Studio on Vimeo.
Added to all these efforts to promote the most avant-garde audiovisual creation is the emergence of new generations of young people who see digitization and hybridization in the arts as a matter of course. "For young people, a digital tool is no different from a colored pencil". And Santi Vilanova adds without reservation: "Digital technologies are no longer an end in themselves, but we now use them to communicate stories and narratives".
With the fusion of light and sound to create an abstract language, PLAYMODES seeks to highlight the limit of our perceptions; not to replace reality, but to augment it, creating a second skin that envelops real, physical space. One of the latest works by these four contemporary creators is Formes, a collaboration with the Brossa string quartet, who interpreted graphic scores based on algorithms.
FORMS - String Quartet from Playmodes Studio on Vimeo.
Txema Seglers