STUDIO #1 - Luca Lazzaruolo

TECHNIQUE AND THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS OF STUDIO#1

INTRODUCTION TO STUDIO# 1

We are at home in front of the TV and the signal starts to give some problems. The image is polluted and even if for a few moments, it transforms into something else, something not foreseen by the source, a small unclear transformation for the recipient. The Studio#1 installation plunges into this phenomenon, asking what’s happening and explores the fruitful possibilities of architecture through the glitch tool. An entire wall becomes an indication, it’s transformed into a sign, in an image that advises the direction, but in immaterial way, totally reversible and for this reason a fruition option, not a directional obligation imposed by the material. The approach of Studio#1 is, from the point of view of the technical realization, more complex than complicated: usually a simple communication process between two machines starts from a source and through a transmitter, makes the signal run in a channel, until it reaches the recipient of the message. It could be said that in the end, Studio#1 installation deals with investigating what happens in the channel of use. So, there’re no longer a camera and a spy monitor, nor a modification of the transmitter or receiver, but a break in the cable, a pause, a stretch in which a process unfamiliar with the visual category is inserted. A handicap imposed on language (so it is still difficult to call it "error"), patched with a foreign body, a prosthesis for the image.

FROM IMAGE TO SOUND

The signal starts from an old Camcorder of the late 90s but instead of bringing the line directly into the projector, the video channel is precisely diverted and poured into the mono microphone input of an audio mixer. Therefore, it loses its trichromatic qualities and transforms itself into an input of blacks and whites, into a code that has contrasts as its only rule. At this precise point the grafting begins, the unfamiliar use of the mixer device. In fact, whether we are talking about audio or video signal, what flows into the cable is electricity, which in this specific case was born to be interpreted as an image but ends up being read as an audio wave. The result is the buzz derived from a sawtooth wave that varies with the changing of the source image.

SOUND CONTAMINATION

The electronic signal is thus not only manipulated through the audio mixer, but also further contaminated before entering the projector; other audio signals enter the mixer and overlap with the one from the Camcorder: audio cassettes sets in loop, different types of interference and above all some FM frequencies from the local radio. The latter is perhaps the case in which the effectiveness of the anthropological variable on image modification is most breathed: it is not only unpredictable for the observer (although the result of an orderly line-up, a precise program in the hands of the radio station) , but it is literally linked to the place where it stays: the sound a