Empty Rave

Multimedia piece for Percussion quartet, electronics and video performance

Composition: Belenish Moreno-Gil, Oscar Escudero

Premiere:28.08.2024 at Überschlag Festival Hannover

EMPTY RAVE is a 40-minute piece that emerges from a reflection on George Antheil's legendary work Ballet Mécanique on the occasion of its 100th anniversary. It evolves into a continuation in the spirit of musical theater, combining acoustic instruments, electronics, mapping video, lighting programming, custom-made objects, and props.
With EMPTY RAVE, the duo Moreno-Gil/Escudero enables an update of the ballet not only through new technologies but also through their working process: The composers develop their "speculative archaeological exercise" in close collaboration—continuing what Antheil could only begin. The connection to the digital and the three-dimensional becomes an immersive experience of time and space.

Through its "expanded narrative," as the composers call it, the piece creates an artistic archive of experiences in which socio-economic tensions and the dissolution of anthropological certainties in our relationship with technology emerge.
For even though artificial intelligence generates deceptive extensions of reality, disrupting our habits, the paradises and dead ends of AI create a sensory space that can be collectively experienced—and perhaps can only be collectively navigated. The audience’s positioning amidst the signals of the technological world and the performers interacting with them underscores this search for meaning:
Who are we as humans in the midst of these technological entities? Can “we” even be separated from “them”? Where do we find orientation in this forest of signals? And what games can we play in light of our evolving environment?
Martin Mutschler

With EMPTY RAVE, we wanted the title itself to reference the epochal fascination with technology and automation that defined European avant-garde movements in the early decades of the 20th century. Against this backdrop, the production explores the roles of party and dance in contemporary mechanisms of community formation, examining how their resonances contribute to the creation of diverse and shared genealogies.
The work is based on the fundamental operating logics of generative artificial intelligence, as found in widely used applications like ChatGPT or DALL·E. These applications establish a direct connection between prompt and result, effectively eliminating the space between words and the generation of reality, as described by philosopher Éric Sadin. In other words, they dissolve the creative act.
The performers articulate textual commands that, balancing on a fine line between automated positivism and extreme sensuality, constantly transform the space, sound, light, and their own behavior. Yet, over time, a void of creative formulas is revealed—a force that ultimately consumes the stage action itself, penetrating the most intimate dimensions of human experience, into corners that perhaps still remain impenetrable.
Belenish Moreno-Gil & Óscar Escudero