Transient – Impermanent paintings

Transient – Impermanent paintings is an audiovisual concert for two motorized pianos and two conductors in collaboration with generative algorithms. Hyper-realistic digital brushstrokes articulate endlessly on a large-scale projection as if on a real canvas. Each brushstroke is sonified with a piano note, creating polyphonic synesthetic landscapes.

The project continues Quayola’s research on traditional artistic techniques in the context of human-machine relationship, this time gradually withdrawing from formal subjects and giving way to the computational substance: the algorithm. As veritable pictorial material, the algorithm becomes the real, tangible subject. Its aesthetic value now prevails over the functional one.

Transient starts a new direction in Quayola Studio, where experimentation extends to sound through unconventional generative systems. A new software has been developed ad hoc for this project, allowing images and sound to be seamlessly interconnected. The same algorithms driving the brushstrokes also materialize in the sound of classical pianos. The emblem of musical tradition, the pianos synthesize technological and human features: by reproducing hand movements, they act as a link with the human realm, while at the same time performing non-human virtuosity.

This project features Quayola’s studio collaborator and musician Andrea Santicchia. In Transient, he has fused his personal experience into the studio’s research, contributing significantly to the development of new lines of enquiry. No longer employed as mere functional design, sound is now pivotal, the soundscape representing the decodification of the process itself.

Transient sublimates Quayola’s process-oriented practice: the performance is not meant to produce finished paintings and music, but rather stage the impermanence behind their algorithmic potential.

Trensient is presented in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute Vienna. We thank for kind support!

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