THE INSECTS emanuel dimas de melo pimena concert and movie November 2022
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all thanks to Laura Pimenta and Mathieu Morhain . |
A really efficient
totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive
of political bosses and their army of managers control a population
of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their
servitude.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
As Gregor Samsa
awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed
in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
It's no use going
back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.
Lewis Carroll, Alice
It's just men
and ants. There's the ants build their cities,live their lives,
have wars, revolutions, until men want them out of the way, and
then they go out of the way. That's what we are now: just ants.
H. G. Wells
Are we all becoming
insects on a planetary scale as part of the New World Order?
Are we comforting ourselves increasingly with behaviors dictated
by the world of consumption, entertainment and manipulation,
with a life without questioning, without criticism?
Are books, works of art (not illustration, decoration or entertainment)
and philosophy doomed thanks to a technological wave that imposes
the exclusion of the elderly, the less educated and the poor
in the name of a world commanded by Artificial Intelligence mechanisms
in rapid replacement of human intelligence?
Is democracy doomed? Are we destined to laws that constantly
change in ways that leave everyone lost? Is education as a tool
for enlightenment, so that every person can discover life for
himself, doomed? Will we live in authoritarian States that become
real fiscal monsters, censors and behavioral dictators?
Both concert and movie The Insects are a kind of non-verbal
reflection sharing where their very structures are a critical
look at the world.
In the first days of 2022, I went to the
Iguaçú Falls in the south of Brazil. I had never
been there! It is the largest set of waterfalls in the world.
These waterfalls reach almost one hundred meters.
Foz do Iguaçú is located inside an area of the
Atlantic Rain Forest. It is, therefore, located in the middle
of a large forest. UNESCO describes the Atlantic Rainforest as
"one of the seven moist forest areas of the Neotropics and
the second largest after the Amazonian rain forest, It covers
around 90000 km², along 3000 km of the Atlantic Coast, covering
17 different Brazilian states (...) The Mata Atlântica
Biopshere Reserve is a biodiversity hotspot. Estimates say that
55% of tree species and 39% of mammal species are endemic to
this region. It is home to 15% of Brazilian primates, including
the golden lion tamarin (Leontopithecus rosalia), and also jaguars
(Panthera onca)".
In 1984 I composed my first concert dedicated to John Cage using
sounds of the Brazilian forests as musical instruments. It was
called Concert for Frogs and Crickets.
The following year, in 1985, using sounds of short radio waves
emitted from all places of the planet, captured inside Brazilian
forests, I composed Short Waves 1985, which would become
one of the most successful musical compositions in Merce Cunningham's
choreographic works, with performances all over the world, from
New York's Lincoln Center to Paris' Opera Bastille, from Venice's
La Fenice to Tokyo's Shinjuku Bunka Center, among many others
over more than thirty years.
Now, in 2022, almost forty years after the Concert for Frogs
and Crickets, as soon as I took my first steps into the Atlantic
Forest that embraces Foz do Iguaçú, I was immediately
enchanted. The sounds of the insects were absolutely fabulous!
The next day I got my equipment and recorded those sounds that
would become the musical instruments of a new concert: The
Insects.
This is not the pure and simple use of recordings, as it was
the case with concrete music.
All sounds are made by insects, which surprisingly take us to
the electronic world.
Several sound samples served as a basis for the laboratory elaboration
of fifteen sets of sounds, like micro compositions, and as if
we were dealing, in a certain sense, with fifteen musical instruments.
These sounds are distributed on a virtual plane, inside Virtual
Reality. The musical meaning of the composition is not only related
to the content of the sounds, to what we hear - but it is mainly
in the relations between its parts.
There is a kind of relations diagram that designates the position
of each set of sound in time and space.
Each plane was originally designed for two performers.
And there are three different possible plans.
Each performer can choose one of the "voices" in one
of the planes.
Each musician is invited to freely transform those materials
in real-time. Thus we have the matrix created in the laboratory,
the score of position of sounds in space and time, and also the
interpretation of each musician.
Despite such a diversity, the unity of the piece is always assured.
The unity is in the relations between the sounds - each one having
a "center" where the intensity is strongest, and also
projections of spatial distribution and of a dynamic design.
The entire elaboration of the musical composition is based on
Zen aesthetic principles, as I have been doing for over forty
years.
So, The Insects is a concert and an experience. A trip. An experience
of a world that is beyond our human scale and that is an essential
part of our planet, of each one of us, being apparently so far
away from our human dimension.
In a completely independent way, also in
the year 2022, I made the film The Insects - which in
this case is presented simultaneously with the concert.
The Insects is on the border between cinema and animation.
It is a brief non-verbal reflection about our behaviors. Are
we gradually becoming insects, ants? Are we losing our critical
liberty, essential for understanding and changing the world?
This does not mean literally changing the world, but changing
ourselves as part of the ongoing transformation of the world,
through discovery, through enchantment.
Will we have the capacity to keep our skills in critiquing technology,
or will we be turned into automatons?
What are we today?
Have we definitely been transformed into insects?
This brief reflection on a non-verbal level that characterizes
the movie and animation involves images from the history of cinema,
of advertising, and of technology, creating associations that,
many of them, are uniquely perceived only by the person watching
it - because the images are worked in a dynamic of time in order
to operate the neuronal boundaries of perception of each one
of us.
There are also quotes and references to classic films from the
beginning of the 20th century.
So, just like the music, the movie is also an experience to be
lived and relived by people. The original version of both the
concert and the film is forty minutes.
Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta
Locarno, 2022
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see at the right side the links for the concert/movie and for the virtual musical score
Photos by Emanuel Pimenta, 2022
emanuel pimenta go to concert/movie see the musical score in VR