i/o

a new sound/performance work created by Joe Diebes and Phil Soltanoff.

i/o was presented at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, August 2006 and generously supported by the Rockefeller MAP Fund.

i/o was presented at the Fuse Box Festival in Austin, Texas in association with Refraction Arts, April 2007 and at Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, August 2007. i/o will premiere in Europe at Novelum Festival (Toulouse, France) in association with Theatre Garonne in November 2008.

i/o is a hybrid work that integrates the languages of sound installation, physical theatre, and opera to explore contemporary relationships between people and machines.  Over the course of the performance both the audience and the performers are immersed in various spatial environments in which eight performers interact with technology in real time.  Live physical and sonic events are processed by computer, then fed back to various locations in the space creating a reflected time-displaced terrain for the performers to navigate. The sung, spoken, and physical gestures make up small vocabularies that are constantly reconfigured, echoed, spatially multiplied, and often simultaneously layered to generate a disorienting and hypnotic complexity from the simplest means.  Woven into this texture (or disrupting it) are moments of human idiosyncrasy which subvert the larger workings of the machine.  The work has a multi-point perspective approach in which the audience is free to experience different visual and auditory perspectives within changing spatial configurations. i/o creates a dynamic matrix of movement, electronic music, sung melody, video and spoken text.

Joe Diebes
Phil Soltanoff