Dear peepz,

I'm thrilled to announce the development of an exciting new project:

"rosebud 2.0".

A video clip intertwining electronic music, dance performance and the moving image all at once and interactively

"rosebud 2.0" is an evolution of the original live-performance piece "rosebud (beta)," created by me, Matthias Krüger (composition/electronics), and Victor Virnot (dance/choreography) during the Cursus de Composition et d’Informatique Musicale at the prestigious Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris in the summer of 2022.
The ambitious goal of this piece was to transform a dancer into a musician who, equipped with motion and contact sensors, shapes the music through their gestures, and all in real-time. The choreography becomes the score, being composed by both the music composer and the dancer at the same time.

rosebud 2.0 emerges from a two-week residency at GMEM (Marseille) in the January of 2024, as an expanded version of "rosebud (beta)"—a "Redux" where original ideas are fully realized and explored, and the poetic universe enriched.

rosebud 2.0 will thus exist in three forms:

A live performance of dance and music
A video clip, to be projected in concerts/video installations and streamable online
An audio recording, to be published on CD and streamable online

The video clip is the object of this crowdfunding campaign. It is at the same time embedded in the recording and publication of my second portrait album, following my first portrait album “ain’t nuthin’ but fairy dust” (2021, WERGO 64352), longlisted in January 2022 for the German Record Critics' Award.

"rosebud 2.0".

The proposed video clip will thus capture the hybrid nature of the piece, transcending by far a mere performance documentation.

I am excited to collaborate on the images with the German choreographer and dance filmmaker Zoë Schreckenberg (Darmstadt/Vienna), who has extensive experience at the intersection of choreography and film. We have already recorded both the video footage and the sensor data.

Now, in the post-production phase, accompanied by the Austrian multimedia artist Micha Elias Pichlkastner (Toronto/Vienna), we'll map sensor data directly onto the video, ensuring that the visual effects and their parameters are shaped and controlled by the dancer's movements.

Lens optics are distorted,

images multiplied,

colors shifted,

shapes highlighted and altered,

lights blurred

– and, again, always related directly to the speed, rhythm and orientation of how the dancer moves his head and limbs.

This creates a meta-layer of the dancer controlling his own image, like with an invisible joystick – so the movement shaping the moving image of itself, all the while shaping the music it is simultaneously generating. The intertwining of each and every layer is complete and the result an intricate, cross-disciplinary work of art.

This innovative approach will not only compensate for the inevitable loss of aura and physical presence inherent in video recordings as opposed to live performances—adding something completely new—, but it will also investigate how musical syntax can be translated into a visual medium, pushing the boundaries of what music can be:

Is it just sound? Or can anything be music, as long as it tells us about the shape of a given entity and its evolution over time?

A short video impression of the working session in past January in the studio (Plateau de Création/Module @ GMEM Marseille) can be gained here 👇👇👇👇

My goal is to create a hybrid work of art that can be enjoyed both live and physically and as a video. This offers numerous chances:

The aesthetic exploration of a hybrid and integrated, trans-disciplinary working process in which all implicated disciplines are intertwined and interact with one another
Thanks to our hybrid approach, audiences can experience an audiovisual work at home without losing its emotional and sensual impact.
Live concerts can include video projections, enhancing the diversity in mediums present whilst simultaneously offering solutions to logistical challenges, as the elaborate conditions for live performances (dance floor, sensor setup, availability of dancers and technicians) are no longer needed—only a video projector and a good sound system are required, and off we go with the projection of the video clip.

The last two points are an important contribution to the challenge of sustainability in the performing arts, where lots of artistic efforts and proposals fall into oblivion due to budget- and logistics related constraints which make repeating performances difficult. Thinking of a piece as a hybrid, cross-medium work of art that exists in various forms—all of which being equivalent, though different—can help counteract this unfortunate economic reality and help conserve the work and make it accessible to a broader audience, as it transcends the confines of highly-specialized niche bubbles, introducing it to adjacent cousin audiences.

Your support will help us complete this project. We’ve already received backing from six different institutions over four countries (!!!), but your contributions will help us bridge the gap and make our vision a reality – together!

Every contribution, no matter the size, makes a big difference, and will be enormously appreciated. 🙏🙏🙏

Join us in bringing this exciting project to life!