Deciban is chdh’s new audiovisual performance where sound and visual shapes emerge from noise. On the screen, a video noise similar to the “snow” of old analog TVs fills the entire space. This hypnotic material, accompanied by its sound alter ego, is animated and set in motion by forces controlled in real time by two performers using laptops.
In Deciban, noise is the natural state after which structures emerge. It is a continuous space built by the superposition of a large number of distinct movements. This duality continues our research initiated in the performances Egregore and Morphist: emergence of shapes from a multitude.
Deciban follows the considerations around “the fold” by Deleuze: objects are not created by dissociation but rather by folding a surface. The latent noise state transforms itself visually and acoustically, modulating and bending to bring out arrangements, textures, organizations.
Deciban is also questioning Shannon’s information theory where noise is only a disrupter of information. What happens when you swallow information in noise? What is the threshold of perception?
Everyone has memories of observing the “snow” on old analog televisions : the brain tries to reconstruct forms based on what it perceives, and illusions appear. The categories defined by Shannon are scrambled and the deciban – the unit of information – emerges from noise.
Deciban is not conceived as a noise performance, but rather as a research on the synaesthetic potential of random materials. .
The chdh collective studies the images / sound relationships by creating audio and visual algorithmic synthesizers. They mainly use these audiovisual instruments during live performances. Using equations describing natural mechanisms, they generate abstract choreography of particles whose minimalist material reveals underlying structures of great complexity, shaped by strange organic attractors. In search of a synaesthetic radicalism, their hypnotic performances work on joint movement between image and sound and belong to experimental cinema in the form used as much as to improvised music in the way they are played.
Since the early 2000s, they showed their projects in a hundred venues internationally, especially the Egregore performance (2011), which explores the group movements of a crowd of particles and Morphist (2015), a study of the transitions forms of an abstract substance. This work also led to two editions: DVD Vivarium (Art Kill Art / Arcadi – 2008) that contains abstract
video works as well as software developed for their creation, proposing to “replay” or edit them, and the USB stick Egregore -source (Art Kill Art – 2014), adaptation of the software used for Egregore, which resulted in a remote performance over 120 computers in twenty countries.
Advocate of free software, they freely distribute their projects and the developed tools for their work, in particular the pmpd physical modeling library for Pure Data.
