A collaboration between Fabrizio Poltronieri (visual concept & programming), Craig Vear (composition & programming), and Anne La Berge (composition, flute & voice)
Postcard is a digital score programmed in Python, whose aim is to help to understand the complexity of working as a team in the Gesamtkomposition of a mixed-media digital score. The concept behind the collaboration was to fuse word, sound, image, network connectivity, real-time audio processing, and live performance of voice and flute into a cohesive whole that had a thought-provoking dramaturgy. The collaborators worked for 12 months building an initial prototype that was premiered at the Kyma International Sound Symposium in Oslo, September 2017, and a further 6 months refining the score into the final work.
On a poetic level 'Postcards' explores augmented conversations across time, place, technology and people. The source material draws from a collection of two long-distance conversations between people immutably bound together through a close friendship and their creativity. These were the letters between George Sands and Gustave Flaubert (1866 – 1876), and 64 from Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell letters (1947-1977). 32 quotes from each of the correspondents (128 in total) were selected, which formed the source material for the work. Through the performance of the piece these quotes were conceptualized as mixed-media postcards, and are abstracted in various ways within the digital score system. The computer environment works in real-time with the performer to co-create a conversation between the here and now of the live performance, the live processing of the sound, and the embedded stories that are held in the media materials.
