Video and sound fixed media

Controller is a collaborative work by composer Silvia Rosani and sound poet Kinga Toth, which was conceived during their residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude. Drawing from Kinga’s poems, which confront us with the delicate role women play in Hungarian traditional families, the performance revolves around a female figure locked in a snowball, whose vital functions are entirely managed by the external hand of a controller. He checks on her temperature, nourishes her, cleans her joints and organizes her memory maps with a machine, which is connected to the snowball via a maze of cables and pipes. All these actions find their counterpart in the sound world generated by the live electronics, which also absorbs the woman’s utterance through a microphone and interacts with her by regurgitating transfigured versions of it in the space. These projections of the woman’s voice are conceived to highlight the strict connection she has to the machine: a machine which at the same time takes care of her and imprisons her. The two characters belong to two different spaces and this aspect is underlined by both the spatialisation of the sound and by the projection of a video, which creates the illusion of a hemispherical space around the woman. As the sound transforms between a clearly human material, sometimes even read text, and noise, resembling the one produced by machines, the woman oscillates between wallowing in her secure condition and gaining her freedom.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/17651