Audio-Visual Synaesthesia Performance, approx. 40 min.
Botborg is an international audio-visual performance group that fuses and rewires raw electronic signals to create intensely visceral experiences of sound-color synaesthesia. Using a complex array of custom electronics, Botborg create totally live multi-sensory assaults of interdependent color and rhythm, pushing the limits of technology to invoke the maximum possible stimulation of their audience’s mind and body. Botborg work with a level of experimentation and improvisation that places them in a territory outside traditional musical or cinematic formats, where the boundaries between art, science, and philosophy mutate until they are rendered meaningless. Beginning in 2004 in Australia (now also located in Germany), Botborg have been making performances of real-time ‘glitch’ sound-video before any such concept was fashionable. Using the largest sound systems and projection screens available, Botborg provides a highly physical experience in concert with the combination of noise, light, and the live space erupt into a work abstracted beyond the cinematic language.
Persons who may be prone to photosensitive seizures are advised to exercise caution.
Botborg’s performances are essentially practical demonstrations of their own ‘meta-instrument’ known as the ‘Photosonicneurokineasthograph’. This is a complex feedback machine incorporating an entangled mix of new and old technologies that are altered and customized to the unique features of every venue. Although the human operators of Botborg are skilled manipulators of the system, it is equally unpredictable and uncontrollable, allowing Botborg to look and sound vastly different on every occasion. All demonstrations are completely improvised, and no source material is used outside the Photosonicneurokineasthograph. The result is a practical demonstration of the theories of Dr. Arkady Botborger (born 1909), founder of the occult science of Photosonicneurokineasthography, or “writing the movement of nerves through use of sound and light.”
Botborg has hosted live demonstrations at many prestigious music, film, and media festivals throughout Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan. Botborg’s films are distributed by specialist experimental film archive Light Cone (Paris, France).