Mouja - Nicola Privato
Presented by: Nicolas Privato
Biography
As part of my PhD research, I am developing a series of magnetic interfaces specifically designed to perform live with RAVE, affording intuitive and playful navigation of the latent space and intuitive mappings of the sensors' readings with latent dimensions. Two of these interfaces, Thales and Stacco, actively interact with the musician through their magnetic fields, thus influencing the performative gestures. Thales consists of a pair of magnetic controllers repelling each other and suggesting the presence of an invisible interface to play with, it was presented at NIME 2023 and is a finalist at this year's Guthman Competition (Georgia Tech). Stacco is instead a recent, fully functional prototype I have been performing with in the last months. It is based on four sensors/attractors interacting with magnetic spheres through a wooden board. By displacing the spheres on the board, the performer controls the navigation in the latent space as well as the position of the sound source in the performative space.
Mouia is a performative exploration of the sonic boundaries of these interfaces controlling through their magnetic fields a series of RAVE models trained at the Intelligent Instruments Lab. This performance is also a playful game of AI reconfigurations and sonic hauntologies, where the presence-absence of the dataset's sonic specters manifests through the unpredictable interactions of the instruments' magnetic forces. In Mouja, the performer plays with the instruments through magnetic spheres, utilising them as a pendulum and manipulating a score hiding magnetic attractors beneath the drawing of an ancient Icelandic spell. These tactile and playful interactions control six superimposed RAVE models, including ghostly voices, choirs, pipe organs, liquid sounds, and morphing percussions. To accentuate the connection with the performer's gestures, Mouja integrates Ambisonics for spatialisation. Mouja debuted in its preliminary form on October 21st, 2023, at Fabryka Sztuky (http://www.fabrykasztuki.org/<wbr />). Video and audio documentation of this performance is available at https://nicolaprivato.com/<wbr />mouja.
