Rechteck Fyrkant – If they were the same thing, they were the same thing, but they are not.

Generative audiovisual performance where human and machine interact. An original, customised and computerised hyperinstrument generates highly synchronised audiovisuals that are affected by the human performer. Based on a couple of video white noise generators, unpredictable rhythmic sequences and tessitura are calculated and perceived by the audience as precisely synchronised audible and visible events. Retinal images and positive after-images, resulting from instinctive saccade movements, are naturally assembled by audience individual visual experience. In Rechteck Fyrkant the visual doesn’t follow the audible and the audible doesn’t follow the visual, they don’t just concur, they occur as unit. 

Design, direction and software by André Rangel.
Cameraman, Francisco Moura.

In Rechteck Fyrkant the space between creative vision and randomness is explored. Algorithms are transformed into a medium of artistic creation through thought and practice that enhances the capacity of expression through the development of principles and methods that support the creation of systems for data creation, calculation and mapping. An original, executable algorithm that uses data, determined by stochastic processes, is the core of this performative system.

For Rechteck Fyrkant an autonomous system was designed and programmed, based on a white noise vídeo generator that calculates in real time unpredictable rhythmic and micro-melodic sequences that are perceived as precisely located audiovisual events. The system, activated and stopped by a human, runs autonomously and the human – performer – can choose among different system states and influence, on each of them, two probabilistic systems – tessitura/gamut and rhythmic (in)determinism.

Rechteck Fyrkant as a highly synchronised audiovisual event becomes a single perceptual object that affects simultaneously the senses of hearing and seeing in time and space.

Directed towards the audience Rechteck Fyrkant produces irregular flashes of light, that last for just some milliseconds, that have different lengths (number of LEDs), and flash at different locations of the square frame that hold the LED strips. During the performance audience will experience strong and vivid multiple, sequential after-images that will be “imprinted” in different regions of the retina resulting in unpredictable, individual visual assemblages/compositions. This unpredictable visual compositions that occur exclusively in the retinas of the eyes of each audience member occur due to several instinctive, consecutive saccades.

The visual display in Rechteck Fyrkant is constituted by four high density addressable LED strips that together form a one meter side square rectangle. One each side of the figure there are 144 LEDs however, the 576 LEDs (4 x 144) that form the square are never flashing at the same time. Verified that are the Gestalt laws of closure, similarity, proximity and continuity, audience members will create, with their own visual perception system, different visual structures and patterns.