Laptop Choir is an audiovisual performance for laptops connected through a local area network (LAN). Using devices already integrated in computers (sound-card , video-card, network communication), Laptop Choir explores the personal computer as a metamedia instrument as well as a simulacra performer.
Context
Laptop Choir emerged from collective spaces (hack lab, workshop, lab, and meeting), where the personal computer belongs to contemporary ecology.
During its elaboration, information exchange, experiments, and tests were realized at the following spaces/events: PD meeting in Berlin (CBase, NK and Studio Weise 7), Cooking Data (private party for friends with laptops and experimental food), pool computer lab (Technische Universität Berlin) as well as a workshop (festival Wien Modern - Vienna).
Working in progress
Laptop Choir is a work in progress, which develops a process begun in other work, including Metaremix (2010), Lanhouse Concert (2010), and an earlier version of Laptop Choir designed for the piece BARE BRANCHES by Pia Palme for the festival Wien Modern / e_May Oct. 2012. The video documentation on this webpage displays parts of the first version.
This work is part of a study about the use of computers in live electronic performance, which addresses the following topics: digital lutherie; meta-instruments; gesture; intervention, network music; and sound art, among others.
Laptop as a meta-instrument
Using devices already integrated in laptops—such as sound-cards (microphone and speakers), video-cards (camera and screens), network communication (wireless connection)—Laptop Choir explores the personal computer as a simulacrum player.
As a portable meta-instrument that combines different medias and software, the laptop can be considered a platform able to operate as an audiovisual studio in real time (recording, transmitting, sampling, cutting, editing, and synthesizing sound and image).
In these ways, laptops merge operations as well as functions (meta-media) via the recording, transmission, reception, and reproduction of audiovisual material. It melts and hybridizes the notion of instrument and instrumentalist, performing characteristics aspects of own medias.
Aspects and strategies of Laptop Choir
Performances