TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

Luka Prinčič: trans.fail/combodagen cover 1Luka Prinčič

trans.fail is an audio-visual conceptual and artistic framework: a glitchy hybrid performance utilising prerecorded and real-time live audio-visual elements and text, forming often frantic and chaotic mesh of data, images and noise. It is sourcing data and transfiguration from number of channels: media-oversaturation, home-made software, sonic explorations and visual algorithms, hacks, glitchings, and number of thematic interests in the background: slavic-romani myth-futurisms, gender fluidity, imperialism, media theories, praxis and artistic critique of digital capitalism.

It’s a digital artistic research on successes and failures of media/gender. How can a gender be seen, used, and/or realized as a medium for nomadic thought, and how are contemporary digital media gendered in their appearances and/or algorithmic backends? Historically gender has been mostly an embodied experience usually coupled with a physical body. In this framework digital media are used as a challenge to that asumption. Fluidity of gender is perceived as a failure, a glitch in the system, while embodied live expression through performance still invites new and undiscovered perspectives.

/combodagen is a further complication of the existing conceptual framework with questions of community, body, and agency in a livecoding a/v performance. Perhaps a useful notion in this context is the activation of »a feedback loop between the live performer and the machine, between live and mediatized, establishing the parameters for live modification where both human and computer edit the same script.« to quote from »Livecoding – a user’s manual« where authors are reflecting on Fischer-Lichte’s arguments on »invalidation of the feedback loop in a mediatized performance«. Another influential theoretical inspiration is Donna J. Haraway’s idea of sympoiesis, or »making with« as opposed to autopoiesis, or self-making. In »/combodagen« the role of self-organized community of autonomous agents in a decentralized and federated network is crucial and vital to »liveness« of livecoding as an art form.