Stack Interchange (2019)


Audiovisual game-performance

The video game “Freeway” designed by David Crane for the Atari 2600 and published by Activision in 1981, served as the inspiration source for the development of this audiovisual game performance. In the original game the players control chickens who can be made to run across a highway filled with traffic in an effort to get to the other side. These game rules are inverted so that the goal is to collide with the moving objects. With each collision the freeway is visually transformed and a nexus of complex self-similar patterns is imprinted. The game mechanics are coupled to two computer music systems which modulate each other and generate vagarious sonic patterns by means of generative feedback networks. The performance is a hybrid of video game play and music improvisation, exploring imaginative links between the two creative activities.

In collaboration with Daniele Pozzi