Afasia

AFASIA investigates all the possibilities offered by the most recent multimedia technologies linking the human body to the computer in real time: during the show, the artist, who is the sole performer, controls everything which happens around him on the stage via computerised systems.

The scene consists of a multimedia space where the background is a large screen for video projection. The frontal part is occupied by musical robots, like the members of a chorus line, designed by the artist himself, who is equipped with an exoskeleton made of plastic and metal, equipped with a series of sensors and prostheses and connected to a computer. Every voluntary and involuntary movement of the artist, who acts freely on the stage, is converted into instructions for the computer. It varies the lights, starts the robots and makes them produce the music that stresses every action and every movement of the performer in real time, while the video projection in the background can be changed, varying scenes and frame motion speed, by activating specific commands located on the exoskeleton.

Although there is only one performer on the stage, many actors are involved in the show even though they only participate in the dimension of simulation of the video-projection. One of the actors in the video is Antúnez himself who therefore plays two roles simultaneously, one physical, in contact with the audience, the other immaterial, in the digital movie. Thus he creates a very disquieting dimension of reality duplication.

With this show, based on Homer’s poem "Odyssey", Antúnez proposes again that extraordinary masterpiece of ancient times as a technological rite. He wants to demonstrate that it is still possible to create poetry and present the highly symbolic message of Ulysses’ initiation journey by using other means and languages, different than words alone. There is no longing, though, for a mythical golden age. On the contrary, he develops the theme of the profound mutation of contemporary man, who has become a technological body travelling towards new dimensions and new discoveries.

This is an electronic piece in which message and communication are no longer linear and immediate, but are affected by the simultaneous interaction of dance, music, sounds, lights, images and mechanic movements, giving viewers the impression that they have entered the science-fiction space of a huge hypertext, where the normal concepts of space and time are questioned by the overlapping of real and simulated events.