Article Preview
TopIntroduction
The performance Assum Livre is part of the set of artifacts presented in the research for a PhD thesis titled Backyard of Sounds: A Path to Sound Immersion (Sapucaia, 2022). The first presentation took place at the Aveiro Events Center during ARTECH 2021, the 10th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts, with the publication of a paper in the proceedings. The performance aims to reflect on the experience of confinement that impacted the world during the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020–2021, a situation we designated a “cage-screen” (Canossa & Rocha, 2020). The second presentation took place online, supported by the Zoom platform.
The inspiration for the work comes from the song “Assum Preto” [chopi blackbird] by Luiz Gonzaga and Humberto Teixeira (1950). We initially thought of the blackbird as a metaphor between the story of the bird and the art of sound. Living in northeast Brazil, the bird in the song had its eyes pierced as if blindness would make it sing better and at all times. It only sings at night, and, in a poetic way, the night would now seem eternal. In a way, it would seem a cruel act in favor of beauty, of the improvement of talent. How many cruel acts were performed for the sake of classical virtuosity? How many good singers before the invention of sound amplification were excluded because they did not have vocal power and, in this condition, could not perform? How many people in music have failed conservatories for not having technique or knowledge in music theory? With the emergence of sound art, many of these paradigms were broken, allowing greater freedom and lightness in thinking and making sound. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic, another complementary thought was born, the feeling of being in a cage, because in addition to the prison of our homes during a lockdown, we were imprisoned in screens to enable online work, education, and a whole life that has temporarily become suspended (Sapucaia, 2022).
The performance Assum Livre was created in this context, critically reflecting on the prison of screens, the imposing norms, and the freedom of humans as opposed to that of animals, who felt freer with the temporary decrease in human intervention in their natural habitats. The images shown in the video projection were captured on the banks of the Jequitinhonha River, in the city of Almenara-MG, Brazil, alternating between the original sounds of the blackbird in the forest and those of the bird in a cage, thus reflecting the agony inside a prison, be it a physical or a virtual cage. A parallel to be made with humans who felt caged behind video screens during lockdown. In a second moment, the performance was transformed into a cyberperformance, being presented in cyberspace on the Zoom platform. The work was presented as part of the CyPeT project (see Acknowledgements for details). In this transposition, the narrative was maintained, but the format and the audience were changed since a cyberperformance allowed greater interactivity of the users.
This article is organized as follows: after this introduction, “The Performative Act Leading to Assum Livre,” presents the concepts of performance, digital performance, cyberperformance, and video art. “The Duel Between Shadows and Lights in Assum Livre” reveals the metaphor of the bird’s blindness associated with the blindness of the contemporary world in several aspects. “The Path to the Assum Livre Cyberperformance” explains the development and details of the digital artifact; this is followed by a discussion of the results and conclusions.