Domenico Sciajno: le son qui marchait dans la couleur |Autore: Giulia DeVal|
Domenico Sciajno was born in Turin in 1965, town in which he currently teaches at Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi. The variety of subjects that he teaches it is already a good gateway to understand his multi-disciplinary approach: Overall music, Improvisation and Composition, Multimedial composition and art Installation.
His formation starts as jazz double bass player at Royal Conservatory of Den Haag, Netherlands, but then he engage with electronic composition.
We could speak about Sciajno like a composer, of course, but his installations place at center the image and the power of colour enough to make it difficult to define a hierarchy between vision and hearing.
In many of his artworks not only sound is spread in the space, but also sight has to follow chromatic mutations projected on different screens: central perspective is left and frontal view gives way to an immersive environment, with an outcome not so far from what happens in M#10 Marseille of Tragedia Endogonidia (Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, electronic composition by Scott Gibbons).
We observe that the definitive stage seems to be the brain of spectator, sound and image directors really want to work on our sensorial perception, using technologies for a centuries old union: the one of sound and colour.
This trend to create a chromatic environments, used both in music and theater contest with Sciajno and Socìetas is also present in tout court visual arts, for example, with James Turrell to whom Georges Didi-Huberman dedicated the essay L’homme qui marchait dans la couleur. [1]
French language, with the use of a feminine noun, offers a good starting to reflect on the power of colour: it is “la” couleur, as “la” mer/mère (sea, mother), from the same origin, matière, something that includes and contains like the amniotic fluid, an uterine magma.
In this case the spectator/visitor has to inhabit the space, he is wrapped by that thanks to the senses.
Sciajno studied this topic so deeply that he decided to found the Institute of Biosonology (Academy of art of listening) in 2005. It is a center of research and development based in Palermo focused on the interaction between sound and neuro-biophysical reflexes of people.
Biosonology uses the vibrational power of sound frequences for access to high levels of our consciusness to sustain our ability of balancing our body in its entirety.
Our mind and our body rapresent a sophisticated entitie made of organic matter and flows of energy in perpetual vibration.
The vibrational nature of sound and our sophisticated ability to feel that make the sound itself a powerful instrument for resonate with the deeper parts of us.
The basis element in common between all the biosonologic sessions is precisely the sound.[2]
Sciajno’s studies on biosonology are recentely collected in the book Vibrazioni sonore per il corpo e la mente.[3]
For the last edition of Polincontri survey,[4] organised by Politecnico di Torino, Sciajno, with the students of the School of Electronic Music (SMET), brought back an important artwork about perception: Music For Solo Performer di Alvin Lucier.
With this composition, Lucier is among the first exploring the use of electroencephalogram to keep biophysical data of the brain activity in order make them audible.
This is an artwork in which the performer is someone that “gives his mind” that is captured in an electric way by ECG and then it is trasformed in sound and music thanks to vibrational devices resting on piano wire.
This element is introducted by Sciajno while in Lucier version brain waves (with an inaudible low frequence) were transmitted to speakers able to produce sound moving on a surface.
In this new version, Sciajno is not only composer and director of situations, he became effectively a performer. His brain is connected to the device to catch the “thought” while an assistant manages all the materials deciding what we will listen and when.
All is trasformed in visual on a big screen: a camera captures what happens inside the piano then all becomes a big colour mass mutating.
In same occasion, Sciajno proposed his composition Sonic Shuffle, Partitura grafica per laptop ensemble e direttore (2010).
Here the composer is the director a laptop ensamble, but never stopping to have a performative capacity.
Sonic Shuffle is designed starting from a graphic score elaborated through a deck of cards shuffled and distributed to the performers at random before the performance. Every card (that is not a common card for play) brings a process that the performer have to follow: the time of the action dipends on the director.
In the midst of all this, there are also a shopisticated video elaboration that comes from two devices: a microphone and a camera. The microphone capures sounds from environment (composed music producted by laptop and cough and voices of concert hall too).
Sounds are mapped as acute, middle and low and take action on parameter of light intensity and saturation of coulour of images captured by a moving camera, managed by Sciajno himself.
Every musician at laptop work in solitude like in a solo: Sciajno directs the action organizing the sound matter and he moves the camera at the same time: sometimes he gives the camera to a student, sometimes he pass the camera on his skin and put it in the oral cavity creating acoustic and chromatic effects.
Sonolume, AudioVisual performance based on lightin tools (2010) is maybe the artwork in which Sciajno shows his approach of performance and his willingness to take action not on the “audience” but on the “spectator”, a fellow with his own physiology.
Sound and light are waves that propagete in the space moving in every diretion of physic world, interacting with the space and the elements that occupy that, both animated and inactives.
Sound and light are when they exist, from their emission to their dissolving, they are indipendent from our consciousness: we feel them only when we intercept their trasmission activating senses in order to interpretate them.
These are the aspects which interest me.
Sound, light and space are the main elements of this performance.
Video is an internal point of view of the performance and, like a magnifying glass, it focus on some details ampliying and spreading them in the space with their “concrete” generators.
This is the reason way I use a camera (fixed on a table or moved by hands during live performance), I used it for catching my intervention on light devices that activate sound and video at the same time.
When sound and light interact with space where they propagate, I interact with footage and development of video,
[…] [In this performance] the main elements (light, colour, saturation, dye, dislocation and ricollocation) are sensitive to the parameters of sound generated and trasmitted at the same time.
[…] The audience is immersed in a flow of sound and light […] multi-dimensional and multi-sensorial that stimulate the active perception. This fact gives the possibility to the audience to expand its horizon throght symbolic conventions of a style […].
The immersive effect is reached avoiding the standard of videoprojection on a flat and rectangular screen. The space is organized before in a site specific way with sheets collocated in different points into the environment (not only the stage but also the space of the audience) […].
This element produce an extended design in many levels and dimnesions that brings the spectator in an architecture of images, colours and lihts. [5]
We can observe, in conclusion, that the work of Sciajno is closed to other expressions of contemporary dance and theater (even if they don’t start from a musical approach).
We can speak for examle of the dancer Saburo Teshigawara who works on the idea of “suspension”, reflecting on passages between gestures and using the body in order to give a shape to something that is not yet visible.
The body of Teshigawara, like the microphone of Sciajno, becomes a “convertor”, in both the experiences light and space are similar to Turrell environments: the coulour trasforms itself diaphanous and sound wraps our senses with the consistency of smoke and fog. It’s a sound that walks in the colour.
[1] Didi-Huberman Georges, L’homme qui marchait dans la couleur, “Fables du lieu”, Les éditions de minuit, s.l., 2001
[2] In http://www.biosonologia.it
[3] Domenico Sciajno, Vibrazioni sonore per il corpo e la mente, Psiche 2, Torino, 2017;
[4] These two performances were performed at Politecnico di Torino for Polincontri, XXV ediction: Music For Solo Performer (1965), Alvin Lucier, performers: Domenico Sciajno (ECG and piano), Luca Morino (electroacustic devices and piano); Sonic Shuffle. Partitura grafica per laptop ensemble e direttore (2010), Domenico Sciajno, performers: Pietro Caramelli, Francesco Cesario, Andrea Cuscela, Roberto Federici, Omar Ferrero, Giulia Francavilla, Andrea Marazzi, Matteo Martino, Federico Primavera directed by Domenico Sciajno.
[5] Card of Sonolume sent to me by e-mail from Domenico Sciajno (private comunication)
Giulia DeVal è una giovane artista che ricerca il suo linguaggio tra le arti visive e la musica sperimentale, concentrandosi in particolare sulla relazione tra voce e oggetto. Dopo la laurea, appena conseguita presso l’Università di Bologna in Discipline della Musica e del Teatro, continua la sua ricerca teorica volta allo studio di performance ibride e alle connessioni tra il teatro d’oggetto e la scena noise europea.”