Discontrol Party #3

Text source: EnsadLab. An interactive party installation conceived and produced under the direction of Samuel Bianchini (EnsadLab), with live sets and DJ sets by Rebeka Warrior, Candie Hank, Retrigger, Front de Cadeaux, Mr Marcaille and WR2OLD, as part of “Nous ne sommes pas le nombre que nous croyons être” — an event of the Arts & Sciences Chair of École polytechnique, École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs – PSL and the Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso — and of the dance festival “Faits d’hiver”.

Discontrol Party is an installation that brings two worlds together: that of the most advanced surveillance technologies, and that of the party. Dance floor, concert hall and stage are laid out to sit under the spotlights and under a powerful computerised control system alike — computer vision, RFID-UWB, infrared cameras, face detection, identification, IoT, traceability, indoor geolocation, smartphone interaction, BLE.

For one night the main hall of micadanses becomes a nightclub fitted out as a control room: far from lighting effects or VJing, the audience, while partying, is confronted with the many visualisations of the computer system that watches it and tries to analyse it. Like a game addressed to a group, or beta testing at scale, the challenge is stated openly: how, through the activity of partying, can you outwit the system, drag it into confusion and — why not — make it crash?

For here the audience is invited to a party whose monitoring is shown to it: maps and listings of its movements and behaviours, the system’s attempts to interpret them, the raw images from the surveillance cameras, those same images transformed for and by automatic analysis, representations of the computer system’s activity, and visualisations that can be acted on from smartphones.

The musicians of this Discontrol Party embody different historical strands of activism on the dance floor: CANDIE HANK (Berlin) and his mutant, unhinged electro flirting with punk and breakcore; REBEKA WARRIOR, singer of the duos Sexy Sushi and Mansfield; TYA, freak priestess of love, revolt and decadence; VERONICA VASICKA (New York / Minimal Wave), embodiment of the obscure electronic music of the 1970s and 1980s;

FRONT DE CADEAUX, an Italo-Belgian duo militating for the party in slow motion, aka New Beat, and for records played at the right wrong speed; MR MARCAILLE, a modern-day Captain Caveman whose astounding show links death metal to actionism; and finally WR2OLD, naturist fashionistas in their first live performance anywhere.

These musicians and performers are experimenters and provocateurs. They can be trusted to make jubilant — even stuntman-like — use of the Discontrol system, and to urge the audience to do the same. A project developed within the Reflective Interaction research group at EnsadLab, the laboratory directed by Emmanuel Mahé, École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, PSL Research University, Paris.

Music programming: Sylvie Astié (Dokidoki). Technology direction: Colin Bouvry, Dominique Cunin, Jonathan Tanant. Video capture: Colin Bouvry. Software development (smartphone applications, data visualisations, video mapping): Dominique Cunin, Jérémy De Barros, Léon Denise, Florent Dubois, Ianis Lallemand, Oussama Mubarak, Jonathan Tanant.

Video projection system, sound and lighting engineering: idscènes. Production assistant: Gwenaëlle Lallemand. With the participation of the artists and designers Sylvie Astié, David Bihanic, Antoine Chapon, Dominique Cunin, Alexandre Dechosal, Alain Declercq, Lucile Haute, Ianis Lallemand, Oussama Mubarak, Olivain Porry and the Transcyberien collective.

RFID accessory design: Claire Bonardot, Ornella Coffi, Cécile Gay, Jennifer Hugot, Pauline Jamilloux, Laure Pétré, Valentine Rosi, Chloé Severyns and Alice Topart, students in Textile and Material Design and in Clothing Design at EnsAD in 2011. Research and development for this installation was carried out alongside the development of Mobilizing.js, a programming environment for mobile screens built by EnsadLab for artists and designers.

A project realised with the support of the Arts & Sciences Chair of École polytechnique, École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs – PSL and the Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso. With thanks to Christophe Aubry (idscènes), Mélanie Bouteloup (Bétonsalon), Pascal Delabouglise (micadanses) and Christophe Martin (micadanses).