No, they're not game designers. Yet something about the sensory-boundary-blurring, fully spontaneous live performances by maverick Korean media artists Tacit Group makes you feel engaged, as if you were playing a series of constantly evolving video games. Using digital technology to create innovative relationships between auditory and visual stimuli, Tacit Group connects the dots between the movement of sound waves through space and visual experiences – ultimately programming a "live" system of organically arising phenomena within controlled bounds.Evoking a true "live" experience on stage, Tacit Group invites their audience to "learn" how the algorithms work, and then to get involved mentally. It's basically like learning how a game is played by watching some one else play it. Once you've figured out the rules, you can start to mentally participate in the various outcomes.The interactive media unit flew to Denmark for this year's Aarhus Festival, themed "Beautiful Mistakes" – almost too perfect for the kind of spontaneously created performances that Tacit Group composes.The opening number at Aarhus, Hunmin Jeongak 2.0 (or Proper Music for the Instruction of the People 2.0), features vowels and consonants that correspond to unique sounds, typed at random by the performers (sitting in a row, on a stage, behind individual laptops). The next piece, In C, deconstructs minimalist musician Terry Riley's sounds, which correspond to images of the names of each note. Space, based on artificial intelligence theories, shows the constant birth and decay processes of individual sounds, living out their predestined courses according to arbitrary algorithms. This performance especially evokes live game play, as each performer can deliberately overtake the sound that another performer is making at any time.
Elements of gaming play heavily into Tacit Group's works. The fourth performance at Aarhus, Puzzle 15, takes the gaming elements from Space to the next level. Live images of the two performers' faces are projected onto a screen. The images are cut up into square puzzle pieces, then shuffled at random. Each player proceeds to try to match his own puzzle pieces in order to produce a deeper, richer harmony each time a correct move is made. This inferred sense of competition between the two "players," coupled with the audience's awareness of how the algorithms are activated, creates precisely the kind of psychological participatory relationship between viewer and media that Tacit Group's art stimulates.The finale piece, Game Over, is a kind of anti-Tetris. Instead of arranging the blocks so that they disappear, the objective is to occupy more space in the grid so that the occupied coordinates produce unique sounds.Through this game-like approach, Tacit Group is able to influence the format of media art performance itself. In their performances, the audience does not sit passively, waiting for some as-yet-unknown object of attention. They intuitively begin to grasp the rules and systematic constraints that underlie the piece, and thus can actively engage their minds in the spontaneous activity of the performers and of the audiovisual stimuli themselves.
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