Case of Emergency Live Electronics/Cinema/Painting Performance project by MedeaElectronique

Case of Emergency
Live Electronics/Cinema/Painting Performance project
by
MedeaElectronique

Case of Emergency is the project title of a performance that deals with the ongoing multi level decay of the historical (and not only) part of down-town Athens, Greece. Athens, like most EU capitals, is loaded with a sequence of historical events, cultural tendencies and practical particularities, which are embodied in variable percentages as aspects of the city’s contemporary character. Such an aspect with a major impact relates to the city’s architecture – buildings, streets and land marks – shaping our habitat and so our everyday life. Our “walkthrough” starts exactly here.

We examine the older, past century buildings that survived (not intact of course) the cruel cannibalism of modern urban “development”. Buildings that nowadays are left to rot under the unbearable weight of overlapping layers of dust and time. We document and explore the relations between the obvious structural decay of the habitat and the degree of influence that this decay has on the people living in it. Not in a scientific or philosophical way, but in a more simple first level aestheticist way, concentrating on their appearance, external colors, eye sight direction and maybe mood… That is of course related to “scientific or philosophical” related variables, but we’ll not deal with this either here or now… Nevertheless, we can’t hide our sadness and rage about it. What for others might be a settled everyday situation, to us is an unacceptable non stop insult to our dignity both emotional and spiritual. We experience striking events and strong emotional stimuli during our day-to-day life, so for us telling stories about these experiences and sharing these emotions through live performance is a crucial artistic approach, as well as a strong need for a cathartic release.

Finding the most interesting and powerful path that would combine our individual mediums for expression was just a part of the creative process. We concentrate on collection of materials on-site, studio creation and manipulation, structured improvisation and rehearsals. We want and need this project to be as direct and as “perception-of-our-own-reality” accurate as possible. We use the following tools and creative methods to achieve this:

- Live Cinema techniques that involve live editing / mixing between live and prerecorded footage
- Live Electroacoustic music created through manipulation of prerecorded and generated elements
- Live Painting on a variety of materials while operating a video camera

Case of Emergency is not intended to dictate or insinuate wise solutions or attribute responsibilities or blames. Case of Emergency is to portray, communicate and so comment on a sequence of evocative real life events, for people to see and maybe think through virtually experiencing it. This is our side of the story; this is our slice of contemporary life…

From Athens with Love

MedeaElectronique