round-ensemble – dianaband

Round Ensemble
AUG 2018

Participatory Performance
@ Post Territory Ujeongguk

Networked Webapp, Web-Audio mix-tool, node.js Chat-tool

Participatory sound performance, “Round Ensemble attempts at mixing and mashing up the positions, opinions, and attitudes of the performance participants musically, electronically, and even physically. Although this concept may sound grandiose or high-flown, what this meeting expects from the audience is not something grand. It is only asking them to let go of the pragmatic positions and democratic expectations that a well-thought-out conclusion, completed music, or neatly arranged agreement would come out of it. This performance lacks a particular purpose, and is at once a highren tropy festival in which the diverse opinions of the participants lose their ways and wander and hover around, and an endless chatter in which the sounds, signals, gestures, radio waves, and sound waves fly around and compete with one another.

Audiences who participate in the performance with their smartphones produce a musical or physical enunciation by forming networks and scrolling webpages. Or, more precisely, they share the acts of enunciating performed by multiple people. Participants are simultaneously the subjects of the enunci ation: reflexive recipients of the sounds, opinions and actions that create a subtle and unlikely ensemble: and the individual mediums of various waves.

It has been an enduring fate of a tele-phone to be the medium that connects individuals’ enunciations on sensory levels. Come gather round if you are interested in finding out how this enduring desire gets expressed in its encounter with smart electronic devices, personalized networks, distrust of democ-racy, the space called Post Territory Ujeongguk, the artist called diana band, and, most importantly, you.