Orizzonte degli eventi

Orizzonte degli eventi is a suite in three movements performed live with gestural interfaces originally designed and carried out at the computer music Lab in Pisa. The composition wants to emphasize the fact that gesture of performers are detected by remote sensing devices, that is with no electrical or mechanical link with the computer system; these devices (aerial-painting-hands, UV-stick and TwinTowers) are based on video captured image processing and infra-red technology and are used for controlling synthesized music and computer graphics projected on a large video-screen. Each movement cross-fades into the following movement and with its peculiarities contributes to a unic global technical and aesthetical result.

Aerial Painting Hand
This system detects positions and movements of a performer's hands: the performer wears two ordinary cloth gloves of different colors and moves the hands in a CCD camera video area. The video signal is sent a computer which processes the images and recognizes the x-y positions of both the hands and the open/close status of the right hand: the computer then synthesizes in real time colo-red images projected on a large video-screen in accordance to the movements of the performers's hands. The performers, while painting in the air also controls in real-time computer generated music.

Twin Towers
This device gets information from the movements of hands and however does not require any kind of physical connection with them. It consists of two sets of four infra-red sensing devices which create two zones of the space (the vertical edges of two square-based parallelepipedon, or towers) where an object can be detected in terms of distance and front and side rotations with respect to a reference frame.The whole system so implements a sort of double aerial 3-D joy-stick.

UV - Stick
The UV-stick system consists of a short straight stick lighted by UV lamp and moved in the visual range of a CCD camera connected to a computer which recognizes the 2-d position and 3-d rotations of the stick; data are then used for controlling in real-time music and sound synthesis algorithms.

Music by Leonello Tarabella and Massimo Magrini
Aerial Painting Hands (APH) system and technical coordination by Giuseppe Scapellato
Performers: M.Cardini, L.Tarabella, M.Magrini

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