Oswald Berthold makes his first trip to Chicago, offering a solo performance for digital sound and video.

Here, he premieres tats=3D94chliche-Chaos. In performance Berthold connects to the Internet to access control data from servers in Vienna, pulling dynamic audio streams and using them in addition to what he does locally. “These distributed online automated entities work like virtual players in a virtual little band,” he explains.

Oswald Berthold (b.1976, Graz, Austria), of the media collective Farmers Manual, is interested in transforming different kinds of data into sonic and visual material. The group, which began in Vienna in the mid-1990’s, is known both for its recordings and extensive live performances, in which computer animation, synchronized with “chaos-particle-accelerating” music, and the overall ambience of uncontrollable technology form a seamless whole. Berthold’s other projects include cd_slopper with Florian Hecker, and his solo work under the name pxp, which was recognized at Ars Electronica 2002 for the release while(p){print”.”,” “x$p++} (Wavetrap).

Update: In 2020 he wrote:

pxp stands for probably lxst pxp

tats=3d94cliche-chaos was the title of pxp’s first and only ever live appearance on kind invitation by Lampo, Chicago, USA, Nov. 2003.

this one is special

it is a cut of the original line recording that is unedited apart from removing a few minutes of silent reconfiguration pauses. track splits were chosen by human expert judgement based on previous aubiocut analyses.

there are three pieces / instruments on feature in the set. the first one is the packet-player. packet-player consists of packet sniffers running on a few network nodes and an audification instrument translating the packet metadata into sound. this comprises the first half of the recording.

second instrument is a voice synth that is equally controlled in a data-driven manner grabbing pieces of text from different bits of network flow and state information.

third piece is a physical modeling fest taking you through a sparse and peculiar harmonic landscape with live waveguide reconfiguration.

the set ends with a wavescrubbing drone piece.

the performance also consisted of a full video track which was equally synced in real time to live network event data, recording missing though.

entire setup leans heavily on work done previously with farmersmanual and Gullibloon.