Deep Space Music at Ars Electronica
2012The 2012 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz opened with a piano concert by Maki Namekawa: works by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Philip Glass and John Cage, celebrating two birthdays and a centenary.
The visuals were not a film. Under the interactive visual art direction of Candaş Şişman and Deniz Kader, the Plato Media Lab team — Zeynep Nal, Bager Akbay, İsmail Kaşarcı, Osman Koç and Kaan Kaner — performed them live, receiving the music in real time and turning it into graphics in the Deep Space projection room, so that the pianist was free to improvise.
Sitting in that room I said, very clearly for the first time: this is what I want to do. The code was still there — but it no longer just switched on a device's light. It transformed a space, a feeling, an experience.