Just got forwarded this brilliant live video of a collaboration between pipa-wielding thruoutin and Chai Mi (柴觅) who together have created a digital media performance work entitled ‘The Sparrow And The Raven’. They describe it as follows:
‘The Sparrow and The Raven’ is a story of music and images coming together in a live performance setting. It ranges from improvised video performance (VJing) and more traditional animated short film techniques. The audience will hear sound and video interacting and morphing in real-time. The performance will consist of a large number of electronic noises and music as well as hand-drawn animation. This combination creates a journey into a fantasy world full of psychedelic, audio-visual space. These ingredients have proven to make each performance unique within themselves.
It adds a certain fresh take to performance – one that goes beyond the typical live show, and even DJ sets that use visuals as an accompaniment. The point of this is more to build narrative through the two mediums. You can view the project here:
Chai Mi (柴觅) seems to be driving the project, having performed with a range of different collaborators over the past 2 years. We had a brief exchange via email with her where we questioned whether or not younger audiences have the attention span to appreciate this kind of work. This is just based on some of the observations we made at Lee Ranaldo / Leah Singers’ performance piece Sight/Unseen back in March (part of JUE | Music + Art festival), where there were quite a few people (seemingly post-90s generation) playing with their phones and not really engaging. Chai Mi disagreed and commented that her performances have attracted more and more people over time.