Neural Luminance Amplifier
by Botborg
Installation for multiple projectors and stereo sound.
About the installation:
When presented as a multi-screen piece in a dedicated space, Botborg’s erratic sound-image eruptions are given license to absorb the viewer in a synesthetic world of euphoric strobing and static. Light plays chaotically amongst the different screens, creating an unstable dialog between the viewer’s left-eye and right-eye (and left-brain right-brain), until the projection surfaces seemingly melt together, singing and dancing in a unified trinity of audible light.
Botborg adopts “noise” and “processing anomalies” as a compositional base; its musicality revealed through the development of clear themes and by the expert selection of colors. All of the naked artifacts of Botborg’s source instrument are present – clicks, pops, noise blasts, deep bass hums – but each of these individually minimal elements has been so laboriously analyzed and arranged that the reconstructed composition transports us to a place completely inverted from its improvised beginnings and one with maximum sensory effect.
Botborg’s single signal is fed back through machines, processed, glitched, twisted, and compressed upon itself, resulting in a crescendo of flickering color and inverted light in which any hint of form rapidly deteriorates into pixilation and is dissolved by darkness.
Neural Luminance Amplifier premiered at the Colour Music exhibition at Drill Hall Gallery (Australian National University), Canberra, Australia, in 2014.
Press:
Botborg sets up a hallucinogenic field of discordant photisms that is always on the cusp of chaos, simulating an out-of-body experience which one hopes will foster a revealing truth… Theirs is a transcendental encounter drenched in a psychedelic fuzz of the RGB colour gambit. They accomplish a “total work of art”, but not as Wagner might have envisaged.
Anthony Oates, “Colour Music” program notes
https://dhg.anu.edu.au/events/colour-music/
A wonderful video musical creation on multiple screens that are immersive and invigorating to sit amongst. It has been created by an audio-visual performance group called Botborg. The performance is called Neural Luminance Amplifier.
https://stephenrrandall.wordpress.com/2014/08/17/colour-music-anu-drill-hall-gallery/
This is one of those “installations” that normally gets me in one of my frothy moods about modern art. Three enormous video screens with a colored version of the snow you get on your television before it’s properly tuned. Accompanying this is a loud, groaning industrial noise running on endless loop which sounded startlingly like the Hypnotoad from Futurama. The main reason I even entered was the irresistible sign on the wall outside: “Warning: This installation features intense strobing effects. Do not enter if you are susceptible to seizures.” I haven’t got a seizure disorder, but experiencing about 40 seconds of Neural Luminance Amplifier had me worrying that I might develop one. I could feel my own neural luminance being amplified to levels beyond what my doctor usually recommends, so I left.
https://uncouthreflections.com/2014/08/24/colour-music/