Botborg

Conversations at the Edge

The Gene Siskel Film Center
164 North State Street
Chicago, Illinois 60601

As Botborg, Berlin/Brisbane-based artists and musicians Scott Sinclair and Joe Musgrove fuse and rewire raw electronic signals to create intensely visceral experiences of sound-color synaesthesia. Using a complex array of custom electronics, audio and video mixers, cameras and screens, the duo blends sound and vision into a self-perpetuating web of interdependent color and rhythm, generated (in real time) entirely by device feedback. The result, they say, is a practical demonstration of the theories of Dr. Arkady Botborger (1923-81), founder of the occult science of Photosonicneurokineasthography, or “writing the movement of nerves through use of sound and light.”

In their first U.S. duo performance, Musgrove and Sinclair will present a new, improvisatory performance. Botborg’s work has been screened internationally and they have performed throughout Europe and Australia, including at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria and the Spectropia Festival in Riga, Latvia.

Scott Sinclair (b.1980, Sidney, Australia) is an audiovisual artist, performer, and programmer. Largely self-taught, and with no allegiance to any single scene, he creates work that involve harsh and humorous collages of different media, from computer music and video art to vocal improvisation and hand-made costumes. He lives and works in Berlin.

Joe Musgrove (b.1978, Newcastle, Australia) is a composer, performer and archivist, active in various aspects of experimental music in Brisbane, Australia, since the mid 1990s. His current solo music production is focused on electroacoustic composition, early modernist composition, Japanese Gagaku and its Korean antecedents, and super-producers of the 1980s such as Trevor Horn. As a video artist, his work focuses on psychedelic abstraction.

Presented in partnership with Conversations at the Edge; support provided by mediaThe foundation inc.