The Taiwan Sound Lab of the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB) launched the first Taiwanese-French international co-production project with the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM) in France in 2020, inviting Taiwanese art team Luxury Logico (豪華朗機工) and Italian songwriter Andrea Cera to jointly create "The Insomnia Sketchbook (失眠寫生簿)," a piece of art that uses a mechanical device to integrate disco balls and music.
The French counterpart is scheduled to hold an online forum in March, inviting artists and the composer to attend its IRCAM Forum workshops and displaying for the first time the creative contents of various production phases.
"Insomnia Sketchbook" is the first international co-production project carried out by Luxury Logico since its founding in 2010. It is also the first project jointly created with a composer. The artists use the conversion of media parameters and the matching ratio to describe various emotions, in an effort to express abstract emotions in a more concrete way.
Composed of short stories in the dark, "Insomnia Sketchbook" details episodes of awakening, clumsiness, purity, dance, and sounds of conflict and destruction, with a spark of light leading the audience, in a dreamy way, in the exploration of dreams and reality.
The exchange visits for implementing the project, that the production team had originally planned, were cancelled due to COVID-19 epidemic, and the exchanges have been conducted online since early 2020. For this purpose, Luxury Logico has built a central control system in Taipei for communication and working in a virtual environment. The art team has also borrowed the National Taiwan Science Education Center's (NTSEC) space simulation physical testing environment, in hopes that, when the art piece is on display, it will allow the audience to sense and experience in darkness the poetic sentiment in the light and sound.
The online forum will be held from 17:00 to 18:00 Taiwan time on March 18. The two sides will be sharing the process of communication, adjustments, and testing of cross-domain creation during the co-production, as well as methods employed during the pandemic.
"Insomnia Sketchbook" is expected to exhibit at the IRCAM ManiFeste art festival in June this year and at C-Lab's art festival "Diversonics (聲響藝術節)" in November, with the exhibition period adjustable depending on the COVID-19 situation in France.