Eugenio Tisselli, “MIDIPoet” and “Media Trash”

from REFF, RomaEuropa FakeFactory

Multiple levels: a freely available software, a manifest, a series of performances using recycled media and recontextualized and remediated literary clips. Effective and convincing example of the creative possibilities offered to contemporary arts by the practices of reuse and reinvention of contents. The two works by Tisselli fascinate for the literary approach. Far from the feasts of visuals, words have often acted as bridges between different domains, with architects inventing readable buildings, bodies that fill with words, dances that forward informatin and paintings that, having abandoned the canvas, start showing words and their revelations.
Here approach is visceral: the performer selects the text, disassembles it, destroys it and gives re-birtg to it in interactive, other, forms in which visual elements re-communicate in other conceptual places the content of the original text, accessing perception through different paths. Image and word are treated with the same methodology, connected to the possibilities of sharing, processing, representing and, specifically, interacting.
From the author:
"I invented MIDIPoet because I wanted to become a Text Jockey. Back in 1999, software for playing with texts and images in real time using MIDI messages was either expensive or very difficult to use and, in some cases, both things at once. Facing this scenario, I knew I had to develop my own tools.
MIDIPoet is an environment for the composition and performance of pieces in which texts and images can be controlled, altered and remixed in real time, using a computer keyboard or any MIDI device (musical instruments, sensors, etc). In its current version, which was released in 2002, MIDIPoet consists of two applications: MIDIPoet Composer and MIDIPoet Player. As their names suggest, Composer contains a set of tools for creating MIDIPoet pieces, and Player performs them. The MIDIPoet environment has its own programming language, made up from relatively complex text commands. In order to make things easier, (and allow other people to approach the tool with realtively little pain) MIDIPoet Composer offers a visual way of creating MIDIPoet pieces, so there is no need to write code."

Megafone

Midi Poet

Midi Poet