Text by Piotr Bockowski
Shielded by space trooper combat gear and a motorcycle helmet, AI-controlled camera eye antennas projecting in front of him, as he cuts through the augmented urban dereliction on an electric unicycle, Singaporean cyborg Derek Stormfield is followed by a chance-algorithm-driven drone interconnected with apparatuses of playful improvisation. A restless agent of countless post-digital art collaborations, Stormfield talks about CRUX Festival, which is upcoming this weekend at Rich Mix in London’s East End.
Alongside Nick Feldman and Marcello Ruggiu, Stormfield is one of the originators of Crux, an audiovisual collective that platforms grassroots media art experimentation, live tech-based performance, interactive displays, and participatory events. It aims to push forward post-digital subcultures. Previously hosted by DIY venues of north-east London, such as Five Miles or New River Studios, Crux has been involved with creative squats, particularly together with Temporary Autonomous Art decentralised collective of squatter artists (TAA). The origin of Crux from squat art and raves shows in their instinctive approach to tech, inspired by a free-flow environment, which experience Crux refines into precision working of sophisticated interactive devices, computer programming and complex simulations, tough in the low-pressure context of improvisation ethos.
Crux crew still plays on feral soundsystems at squats, alongside their more nerdy live audiovisual performances. They are supported by a close group of friends who help to organise the festival, workshops, and jam sessions. This year, the Crux festival hosts a synth building and circuit bending class, facilitated by Drake Music School. This institution researches and develops electronic music instruments for people with limited range of movements, missing limbs, or cognitive disadvantages. Drake’s school exploration of and experimentation with custom electronic music devices for disabled people expands the understanding of technology through issues of compromised bodily performance.
The nature of technology may be revealed only when it breaks, as Heidegger suggested. Bodies of disability, just like broken tools or interrupted protocols, become the vantage point of acute reflection on the meaning of technological processes that otherwise remains obscured by functional automation. When tech works well, we just use it – only challenged sensorium becomes self-aware and urgently available for new modifications. Can we comprehend our civilisation only when it fails our bodily needs? Virtual & Augmented realities open up extremely desirable environments for immobilised bodies, a liberation into the realm beyond physiological gravity or physical friction, free electronic drift. Thus, after Drake, in their philosophy of open access, Crux embraces the importance of learning from disabled people.
Interviewed about Crux´s vision of future AV performance development, Stormfield muses about technological advancement towards increasing accessibility. Consumer tech, such as laptops, is already powerful enough to generate live audiovisuals. Multimedia continue bridging disciplines, and media performers transform various data into simulation patterns. Web feeds, possibly monitoring urban infrastructures on another continent or chemical imbalance within alien bodies, can be taken out of the Internet and applied to the modulation of colours, shapes or sonic values. Various phenomena observed by technology are abstracted as a stream of data and translated into excitingly unrelated artistic experiences.
Media performers synthesise collective forms of synaesthesia, accelerating global hallucination of telecommunication aesthetics. In the future, more synaesthetic processes shall be available to every common user of smart media, speculates Stormfield and concludes that technology becomes more inclusive as it comes into dialogue with people marginalised due to their social, financial, and bodily abilities. AV tools are available to a wider range of people, and new technological perceptions are visible and audible to humans, stimulating the development of media performance art.
Fostering uncompromising media performance, Crux festival will host two major acts of New Weird Britain IDM, both powered by body-stimulating, brains-slicing and guts-cutting, bleeding edge of industrial noise digital transfigurations: UKAEA (who will perform at the end of the festival, just after Sculpture project of prominent media/AI artist Dan Hayhurst) and AJA Ireland (the headliner of the festival party, scheduled just before Samuel Kerridge).
Apart from assisting technically with the artists’ setups and putting together promotional video teasers, Stormfield created augmented reality video screenings embedded inside the Crux Festival space – QR codes scanned by phones will activate video projections superimposed digitally onto the wall. Stormfield’s main AV production guise is the shapeshifting multimedia project SCALD, ongoing for about a decade now and focused primarily on collaborative exchange with very different artists of more analogue media, such as string instruments, singing or other bodily sounds, multimedia theatre as well as abstract movement choreographies, shibari play or pole dancing, more often than not wired to movement sensors.
Stormfield’s most current collaborator, Xenia Black, was trained as a ballerina in Italy and later took up pole dancing in the UK. Xenia is an athlete with a striking expression of angular limb jag. Their collaborative act premiered last year at innovation-oriented Future Shock, arguably the most original event hosted by the Fold club. Later that year, they toured in South Korea, invited to perform at the Sonic Bloom festival, which inspired them to radically expand their movement forms of highly charged electric erotica. Probably the most anticipated excess of the CRUX Festival, Xenia’s movement will be triggering arpeggios, melodies, drum breaks, impacts, strings, bells, and prurient panting of the multimedia-assaulted audience.
