Rui Costa

Começar de Novo

Four people will meet at the source of the Paiva river.The art will capture the meeting without revealing what happened. It will be a tribute to that place, to those people and to that moment.The meeting is intimate. What is going to happen will not be passed to the outside. Only the spirit of the moment and the place will be shared in the form of a set of sound recordings that will form the basis for a composition and in the shape of an installation: a miniature reproduction, as accurate as possible, of that moment – of the geographical space and the sonic space-time.The sound will be played through a set of small speakers controlled by Arduino electronic circuits.

The human being lives in a constant attempt to control the circumstances – his and the external –inorder to achieve a desired goal. But some say that the un anticipated moment is infinitely more useful.Probably the secret is somewhere in between.The goal here will be a “memorable meeting.” The challenge will be to decide which circumstances should be monitored and which should be left to happen by chance.

In the first day I will bring a set of initial conditions. One is an idea of the place for the meeting. Others are more practical: food, comfort, decorative elements. In the following days the conditions will be optimized in order to achieve a good configuration. The aim is to reach the “memorable meeting” by successive approximations.

We will try hard to be alone. We will avoid the interaction with the outside world. We will forget that we are being recorded. The conditions for registration of the meeting will be defined at the beginning of each day, without changes over the course of the day. The sound documentation will be obsessive and exhaustive. The intention is to register everything from all points of view on both banks of the River.

The river as a facilitator of the memorable experience. The source as a metaphor for a new beginning. Art as an opportunity in life (and vice versa).

Rui Costa is a sound artist from Lisbon, Portugal. He has been publicly presenting his work since 1998. He is a founding member and artistic director of Binaural.

He developed a series of sound works focused on the translation to the sonic domain of other realities such as the tourist’s experience of Lisbon (“Sightseeing for the Blind”) and an account of a train trip (“LeTrain de Bordeaux”, based on a short story by Marguerite Duras).

Rui Costa collaborated with the Spanish musician Iñaki Ríos, with whom he developed electronic composition systems programmed on Max/MSP, Lisa and Csound and developed a series of site-specific works in Nodar.

In 2007, he started collaborating with the vocal performer Manuela Barile, through a project entitled “LaScatola”, which was conceived as a series of installations and audiovisual performances. Rui Costa is a regular speaker in lectures and gives workshops dedicated to sound art.