Tatiana Pentes
Artist
Strange Cities: A Musical CD-Rom
Abstract
Strange Cities is an experimental interactive multimedia work
authored for CD-Rom release and exhibition. Through the disclosure
of evidence, Sasha dreams, discovers, remembers the exilic identity
of her grandparents Xenia and Sergei Ermolaeff (a composer and
orchestra leader) in fragments and traces of their music, memories,
personal effects and photographs, in their struggle to survive
the Russian and Chinese Communist Revolutions. The inspiration
for the work is a tune of the same name - a musical illustration,
an imaginary vision of old Shanghai, Chinese metropolis, and
International Settlement, conjuring mythic, filmic, musical and
personal images of the city port.
The Strange Cities musical score written by Alexander Vertinsky,
Serge Ermoll and Ira Bloch, was first performed by a jazz orchestra
of White Russian emigres in the cabarets of the International
Settlement of Shanghai, China in the 1930's and 40's. Strange
Cities draws upon the legacy of the Shanghai milieu, the Chinese
gangster film, a musical caberet genre, orientalist erotic literature,
intigue novels, and the films of Josef von Sternberg. Coined
capital of the international underworld, the city of Shanghai
became a seductively strange locale symbolized in the Western
imagination, in reality the city was most often the final port
of call for political refugees.
Strange Cities experiments with performance, sound, image
and text and their dramatic representation in the interactive
environment. Providing a challenging approach to traditional
modes of story-telling and music in the interface design, the
user is provoked to discover the Strange Cities tune in the graphic
portrayal of its musical script, sonic perception of it vocal
lyric, and orchestration through user interactivity. The musical
motif is symbolic of the way in which the multimedia artist assembles
a range of media with the software tools, just as the composer
arranges musical notes on the stave and the conductor orchestrates
- like music, interactive multimedia is a time based medium,
where events and actions upon those events take place in a flow
of divergent temporal sequences.
Bionote
Tatiana Pentes graduated from the College of Fine Arts, University
of New South Wales, (1995) with Master of Art (Media Arts : Film,
Video, Sound and Multimedia). Strange Cities CD-Rom won Best
Innovative/Artistic multimedia category, 2000 ATOM AWARDS, Australia;
was promoted at the New Talent Pavilion, MILIA GAMES '99, Multimedia
Festival, Cannes, France; exhibited in the 1999 EXPERIMENTA CD-Rom
Exhibition, Australia, and dLux media arts, D.art 99, Artspace,
Sydney Film Festival, (+ touring). The artist was successful
in attaining an Australian Film Commission Multimedia Program
of Assistance in January 1997, to develop an interactive script
for the Strange Cities CD-Rom, and June 1997 received Production
Funding to complete the project. The title was launched at SCA
Gallery, Sydney College of the Arts, October 1999.
Presentation Type
30 min paper