From Tuesday 7 to Friday 10 December the tenth edition of the Festival returns live to the Storchi Theatre and the Astra cinema with historic artists and first appearances
Hyperrealistic digital landscapes and ancient suggestions, obsolete technologies pushed to the limits of possibility and multi-layered sounds, ambient, electroacoustics, minimalism, order and chaos. Node, the festival of digital arts and electronic music, returns live. From Tuesday 7 to Friday 10 December, it celebrates its tenth edition by creating a small but variegated synthetic microcosm, conceived as a summa of what has been built so far. Moving between the Storchi Theatre, the Astra cinema and the Church of Jesus the Redeemer, the festival offers a programme consisting of a multitude of languages, codes and forms, including welcome returns of historic artists and first appearances.
The festival, realised by Lemniscata and fuse*, with the contribution of the Municipality of Modena, the Emilia Romagna Region and the Fondazione di Modena, was presented this morning, Wednesday 1 December, at a press conference at the Astra cinema with the Councillor for Culture Andrea Bortolamasi, the Festival's artistic director Filippo Aldovini, Mattia Carretti, co-director of fuse*, and Oderso Rubini for the Region.
As councillor Bortolamasi commented, 'the return of Node live is wonderful news, the result of work that has always grown over the years and that allows us to celebrate the tenth edition with a high quality programme. The festival, with its mixture of languages that look to the future,' he added, 'is yet another piece of the creative city that experiments and innovates in the media arts. Filippo Aldovini also emphasised how Node is continuing its "path of growth and transformation, giving a sign of renewed and precious vitality that is surprising for its ability to keep faith both with its vocation linked to the most radical research and with the festival's international character. The tenth edition, he continued, is a way "to celebrate and retrace what Node has shared most preciously with its audience and the community of Modena over the years, inviting back to the city some of the artists who have most left their mark on the history of the festival along with first appearances and national exclusives".
Node debuts at the Storchi Theatre on Tuesday 7 December with the return of Ryoichi Kurokawa, who continues his journey at the festival by presenting "subassemblies", his latest a/v project in which images of ruined buildings and disused spaces recaptured by nature are rendered through 3D technologies, creating a dynamic hybrid reality in constant balance between order and chaos. The perfect counterpoint to Kurokawa's set will be the exchange between French electroacoustic musician and theorist François J. Bonnet, aka Kassel Jaeger, and composer, producer and founder of Sunn O))) Stephen O'Malley who evoke the calm before the storm by slowly unfolding a vast glacial plain over the audience.
Also at the Storchi, on Wednesday 8 December, Quayola returns to Node together with Andrea Santicchia aka SETA to present "Transient - Impermanent Paintings", a duet of motorised pianos and video projections, combining human and technological elements through a system of unconventional generative algorithms. This will be followed by "kistvaen", the performance by Roly Porter and MFO, which on the basis of pre-Christian funeral monuments grafts a narration for sounds and images, between field recordings, folk instrumentation, digital elaborations, cinematographic images and light drawings, into which enters the voice of Mary-Anne Roberts, interpreter of ritual songs from the Welsh funeral tradition.
On 9 December, at the Astra cinema, German sound engineer and musician Robert Henke returns to present 'CBM 8032 AV', an audiovisual performance that pushes five Commodore CBM 8032s to the limits of their technologies amidst variations of noise and digital sine waves.
It closes on 10 December in the Church of Jesus the Redeemer (in Via Leonardo da Vinci) with 'Dies Irae', a pièce for female vocal quartet and electronics by Swedish composer Maria W Horn that opens with a choir and concludes with an improvisation for harmonised chalices, voice and electronics.
All appointments are by reservation only and for some there is also an entrance fee. Reservations and tickets can be made online at the Node website (www.nodefestival.com/archivio/2021/biglietti).
The image of Node 2021 was created by Slovenian artist Natalia Trejbalova. "Centerpiece 3 (Greetings from Rachael)" is part of a series of sculptures designed to inhabit the environments of an unspecified future, in which organic life as we know it has given way to hybrid forms that cannot be catalogued. They represent small synthetic worlds, still lifes fixed in time, relics of another dimension, destined to be contemplated forever in the same state.
