DONJON

Donjon is an audiovisual concert performance in which the performers gleefully deconstruct a wide range of objects culled from popular culture, particularly audiovisual equipment : turntables, radios, computers, musical instruments, telephones, fax machines, video cameras – but also racing cars, cocktail blenders, battery chickens, and various other domestic and fantastic appliances of ages past and present. All the consumer goods are shown in 3D animation and projected onto a large screen at the back of the stage. The performance consists in making the objects malfunction, subjecting them to accidents, breakdowns, and audiovisual contortions. Thanks to very special interfaces reminiscent of the 1980s penny arcade aesthetic (recycled control panels from games like Asteroids, Gravitar, Missile Command or Space Duel), the two players interact with the 3D sound-emitting objects, manhandling them sometimes in intersecting, criss-cross fashion, with the sound controlling certain visual parameters and vice versa. The objects are shown in minimalist 3D. This highly graphic stylistic choice permits a humorous look at the modelling modes in current computer graphics (wireframe, solid or surface modelling) and at the ways objects look both inside and out. A number of the objects are so closely “probed” in ultra-closeup images as to show that, behind a given casing, there’s often nothing but empty space… By rotating, flattening, dismembering and looping both sound and image, the performers construct/deconstruct, generate and modulate a musical imaging game that evolves into a veritable audiovisual concert, which is then varied in each succeeding show. Donjon is, in short, a settling of accounts with the glut of consumer merchandise that surrounds us.