"FORTELLERORKESTERET" ("The Telling Orchestra")

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"FORTELLERORKESTERET"

("THE TELLING ORCHESTRA")

"FORTELLERORKESTERET" ("The Telling Orchestra") is a "live" room-installation that can be described in many ways:

An audio-visual composition where rusty mechanics meets new technology on the backside of

a "video-shadow-theatre" on Greenland. A machine, a polyphonic instrument, or  a whole orchestra with many

voices and tunes,mutating shapes and interwoven stories. An electro-mechanical construction that

functions as an audio-visual "animation-machine"or a mechanical figure-theatre machinery, where images, sculptures,

sound and video is deeply integrated into each other to form an audio-visual-spatial composition.

By use of  computer controlled motors and robotics the primitive wooden construction of old weather-beaten planks has become

an automatized sculpture-machine with the ability to in a second, totally transform the space in radical ways.

"That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it began to sprout,

will it bloom this YEAR?"

"The Telling Orchestra" has gone through a constant development for almost three years and has become

a very advanced and complex construction. The original concept and choice of materials originate from

a journey to Greenland in 2003. As the process went on the different medias that interplay started to generate images

and stories on their own - as if the construction itself was hinting to what it was capable of expressing.

The installation has now become a true Telling Orchestra that can create extensive visual tales, mechanical ballets,

mirror- and shadow plays.It can produce pure abstractions as well as concrete literary stories,

psychological relations among motorized fragments of bones.

Religious visions from the roadside, shipwrecks and machine romance, … never ending.

"The Telling Orchestra" was made by: Asle Nilsen, Lisbeth J. Bodd, Håkon Lindbäck,

Piotr Pajchel, Christian Blom and Rune Madsen.

Thanks to: Trond Lossius, HC. Gilje.

PREVIOUS PRESENTATIONS OF THE TELLING ORCHESTRA INCLUDE:

2004: Lofoten, Norway, as a part of Stamsund International Theatre Festival.
2005: Tou Scene, Stavanger, Norway.
2006: Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, Austria, as a part of the festival Steiricher Herbst.
2007: Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (together with another Verdensteatret-installation entitled the louder room)
2008: NAMOC, The National Art Museum of China, Beijing, as a part of the exhibition Synthetic Times.
2008: DORA, Trondheim, Norway.

FUTURE PRESENTATIONS INCLUDE:

2010: Guangdong Art Museum, Guangzhou, China. (together with a new Verdensteatret-installation that will premiere here) 2011: New York City.

       

THE CONSTRUCTION:

The main construction consists of old weather-beaten planks.

Inside the exhibition-room you meet a primitive but complex wooden construction of old weather-beaten

planks withseveral plateaus in different heights and depths where seemingly incompatible materials

and technologies are linked together. Each figure has its own "voice" and a repertoire of movements and sounds.

OBJECTS / FIGURES/ROBOTS

The objects or figures vary over a scale from geometrical abstraction to figurative naturalism.

The choice of material is anarchistic and chosen by coincidence.

The material has always its own story to tell within itself.

This also changes according to the relation it a part of.

SHADOW-PLAY:

The installation also functions as a shadow-play where the spectators can walk from one side to the other.

On one side (the one we call the backside) you can follow everything as a pure shadow play on the screen.

(The screen works both ways). And on the other side the spectator is on the same side as the objects/figures

(what would normally be the hidden side of a shadow theatre).On this side (which we consider as the front)

the spectator can follow the actions of the objects/figures and also see all the shadows and videos on this side.

.....shadow play...

By starting to use shadows as a tool for telling stories an make images one immediately set a whole passenger-train of clichés

and grotesque islets in motion before ones inner eye. In a long chain the Death comes in all kinds of shapes, from the European

middle ages with its living skeletons in a "dance macabre", dragging people down in their holes and graves.

-Heavy gloomy phantom-shadows of "doppelg˛ngere", hunch-backs, demons and nameless

mutants flashes by in thelit train wagons.In other wagons we see the slim elegant

islets from Indonesia with their long pointed noses and slanting eyes,

with fantasticperforation-patternsall over their bodies,

making them light as feathers and thin as smoke. 

All this night-train wagons, rolling through the earth-shadow

up through history are full of these strange black flat shapes.

 

...combination of shadows and use of video as lines and spheres of light....

..shadows from some of the moving objects/figures..

MOTORS/ROBOTS

We have developed different types of motors and robots to move the objects.

These consists of small, silent dc-motors, power transformations and small micro-processors.

The motors shuffle the objects back and forth, rotate them and move them vertically.

The motion is controlled by a self-develloped software that reads a kind of text-based score; 

a score for a "software-concertmeister".

 

MIRROR PROJECTIONS:

We try to get a more organic, manual tool out of the video. We try to transform the somewhat synthetic impression

from the square screen into a more direct manipulative tool. To manage this we use different bendable mirrors.

The photos here show examples of these manipulations through a bendable mirror controlled by 4 tiny motors on the

backside that is programmed to push or draw each corner of the mirror. This makes it possible to bend the images into seemingly

three-dimensional light-figures with the image intact at the same time. It is as if one can see both sides of the image at the same time.

It can be manipulated from focused image to betrenched out throughout the room or be become a little abstract knot of light.

Even tiny motions of the mirror gives an enormous effect,so its hard to control 100%.

But this manipulation is also very interesting when it behaves unpredictable.

It becomes an inscrutable organic image which is hard to detect how arises.

 

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