bucolica.exe (2022)
experimental pastoral opera, sound performance/installation
bucolica.exe a pastoral opera inspired by concepts of the mountainous idyll of the Swiss Alps and one of its most famous inhabitants, the fictitious character “Heidi.” It explores the relationships between ruralism and nationalism, questioning common-held idealizations of a pastoral lifestyle by investigating how it forms identity, and touching upon the recent resurgence of völkisch—ethno-nationalist ideologies in Germany.
By juxtaposing self-built musical instruments—sculptural works that could be described as “sound objects”—with future-oriented technologies such as 3D holograms and a singing goat robot a dystopian setting is created to accommodate an AI supported musical piece based on duets between the robot goat and a hologram girl.
several performers, hologram, robotic goat, electronics, wooden mechanical instruments, fake logs, slime
Voices: Lucia Margarita Bauer, Fabian Young, Max Pross, Lola Goeller, Rosemary Hardy, Maria Markina, Joseph Ostendorf, Edis Ludwig, Kaoko Amano, Johann Leutgeb, Timotheus Maas, Lukas Anton
installation views: Reaktor (Wien), picture: eSeL, Callie’s (Berlin)
For leontopodium_fortuna.wav, TinTin Patrone had the texts of madrigals, pastoral poems and folk songs analyzed by an artificial intelligence and used them as a start-ing point for new original libretti. From the abundance of primary texts, the machine was supposed to distill the content and atmospheric core of the alpine and shepherd idyll and came up with amazingly spooky text creations.
In keeping with the hybrid authorship between the artist and the AI of the libretto, the vocal interpretation of the texts is also created in the interplay between a collective of previously recorded singers and a robotic goat as well as a hologram, which as vocal mediators give the recordings a performative body.
The romanticism of the Alps contrasts with the comic-like, distorted working world of the gig economy. Under the watchful eyes of the goat and the hologram, performers produce useless things on archaic-looking apparatuses and, as a by-product, noises for the soundscape in the Great Hall of the REAKTOR.
In leontopodium_fortuna.wav, the German-Filipino composer, musician and performance and sound artist TinTin Patrone skilfully weaves the elements of a digital chamber opera, performance and the immersive setting into a shrill media work about ideology, longing and modern working environments.
Reaktor, Wien 2022
