Saturday
dmstfctn ft.Evita Manji + Kode9
dmstfctn ft. Evita Manji
presenting Waluigi’s Purgatory
Waluigi’s Purgatory immerses the audience in a 3D theatre simulated in real time, to tell the story of an AI being that finds itself in a purgatory reserved for AI beings that have cheated during their training.
Both artists and the audience guide the AI through its encounters with other characters and make choices, each using their mobile phone to move an individual light within the 3D simulation. The characters are animated in real time through facial motion capture and voice modulation, and an ambient soundtrack is composed and performed live by Evita Manji.
The title of the work refers to the “Waluigi Effect”, an obscure theory that suggests that AIs go rogue and act as antagonists due to the abundance of protagonist-antagonist tropes found in the internet texts used to train them.
dmstfctn
dmstfctn is a London-based artist duo that works with audiovisual performance, games and video installation. They have performed regularly in galleries, art centres and festivals dedicated to electronic music and digital art. They are the authors of Flash Demons (2019), a collection of audiovisual performances about financial market collapses, and ECHO FX (2021), based on the experience of Brexit, among other works.
Evita Manji
Evita Manji is an Athens-based musician and vocalist who connects the dots between the human experience, climate change, quantum physics and death, in an attempt to dig deeper into the primordial truth of existence. In 2023 Evita released their debut album Spandrel? and have performed in venues across Europe and at some of the leading contemporary music festivals.
Kode9
presenting Escapology
Kode9’s audiovisual live show Escapology stems from his eponymous 2022 album. Escapology (2022) was the first piece of a larger sonic fiction project, Astro-Darien, released in 2023.
Astro-Darien is a fictional video game that deploys science fiction to critique colonial history, morphing pixelated images into dance sounds. Escapology’s narrative revolves around the meltdown of the UK, and an escape via spaceports in the north of Scotland to an orbital space habitat.
Kode9’s most ambitious work yet as a multidisciplinary artist, Escapology reconfigures tense atmospheres into slices of high-definition, asymmetric rhythms woven through thrilling sound design and vertiginous sonorities. On stage, the artist simultaneously performs music from the record and new material and manipulates visuals created by himself and frequent collaborators Lawrence Lek, Optigram, Plusminus Studio, Bianca Hic, and Mark A. Garlick.
Kode9
Kode9 is a DJ, producer, artist and writer. A key figure in the British electronic scene, he is one of the founders of the dubstep movement, and in recent years has established himself as a multidisciplinary thinker and artist. He is the founder of the groundbreaking record label Hyperdub, which he set up in 2004. More recently, he founded the sub-label Flatlines to focus on audio essays and sonic fiction. Kode9 has recorded 5 albums, 2 with the late vocalist The Spaceape, Memories of the Future (2006) and Black Sun (2010), and 3 solo albums: Nothing (2015), Escapology (2022) and Astro-Darien (2023).
He is the author of Sonic Warfare, published by MIT Press in 2010 and the co-editor of Sonic Faction (due out this year) and Unsound: Undead (2019), both for Urbanomic Press. He has produced numerous installations, including at the Tate Modern and the Barbican in London, UK.
Support: Portuguese Republic – Culture / Directorate-General for the Arts. RTCP – Network of Portuguese Theatres and Cinemas