Lux_interior

Francisco Sanmartín

Lux Interior is an audiovisual improvisation of the collective PDP11, in which Carlos García Miragall participates on the electric guitar and visual generation and Paco Sanmartin on the processed electric bass. Lux Interior was presented in concert at the Cerveró Palace in Valencia, as part of the exhibition En Clau de LLum and at the LPM live Performers Meeting festival in Amsterdam. The visuals are automatically generated from the soundtracks by means of an application that we have developed in the Java programming language, Cyclops. This application generates the images from the numbers obtained from the digitalization of sound, constructing each pixel of the image with the numbers of the sound lines. It is a very purist method where the image is constructed exclusively with the numbers of the sound, placing them spatially with different strategies. In each instant of time different images can be generated and these are composed between them. he main concept we want to develop is light and the first idea that came to mind was Lux Interior in relation to the singer of the psychobilly group The Cramps. Lux Interior represents an icon of rock history for its originality and musical contributions. Reviewing their work we noticed a concert that the group made on June 13, 1978 for patients of a mental clinic in the state of California, this is a very interesting concert especially for the special way in which it interacts with the mentally ill. As a result of Lux Interior, we are chained to the idea of how a child listens when he is still in his mother's womb, establishing a direct relationship between the light or life inside the uterus and his way of perceiving the world that surrounds him. Additionally, we found it very interesting how the way to generate the visuals also fit the concept because we visualize the inner light that carries sound through the language of numbers. Finally, with those concepts in mind, Lux Interior as a rock icon, Luz Interior as a child inside the maternal womb and Lux Interior as the image that carries implicit sound, we made a simple narrative with the aim of structuring the performance and later the audiovisual piece. The narrative structure of the piece is divided into 3 parts: Johnny, a child still in his mother's womb, is at ease listening to his and his mother's heartbeats, the typical noises of the house and above all the voice of his mother, Mary. Freddy, the child's father is a mental clinic nurse, arrives home very happy to say that Poisson Ivy[1] has reunited with The Cramps to pay one last tribute to Lux Interior at the clinic. Mary is very happy and starts looking in the closet for her old golden suede boots to remember old times. The concert features one of the classic tracks from The Cramps, Human Fly. From these ideas we have structured the concert, establishing the basic guidelines of composition and improvisation. Each of the parts has a duration of 8 minutes (approx), so that the total duration is 25 minutes (approx) and its sound and visual representation is a metaphor of the audiovisual script. [1] Poison Ivy is the stage name of Kristy Wallace, guitarist for The Cramps.