‘Memento Machina’
DUNYO x DOM
PHI / Montreal / CYMATIQUES III / 2025.02.15

In this audiovisual meditation on technological mortality, "DOM" (Dominic Thibault) and I (Alan "DUNYO" Avorgbedor) create a dialogue between past and present media technologies. Our performance explores the tension between obsolescence and innovation, excavating the remnants of analog technologies that have informed our artistic trajectories.

What makes this collaboration unique is our shared approach to audio-visual manipulation. Dominic shapes soundscapes through his feedback-based effects rack, while I work with a modular synthesis setup featuring complex oscillators and a granular sampling engine. Together we develop an analog aesthetics of automation, chance, process, glitch, and breakdown. Both our sound systems directly influence the visual domain. We generate 8-bit graphics and create intricate feedback loops with Video8 and Hi8 systems. These cameras simultaneously document the performance and feed back into one another, mixed and expelled through analog video circuits, creating cascade of chromatic aberrations and ghostly afterimages. Within the feedback loops, the automated demo screen of a 90s Video8 camera, a relic of consumer technology, becomes a generative element, its pre-programmed sequences interacting with the live video feed, creating layers of automated process within our organic manipulations set iteratively against tessellating 8-bit landscapes and a memento mori.

Throughout the performance, we engaged in semi-structured video improvisations, creating a fluid interchange between audio, visual, and textual domains. This performance, a form of 'slow tech' exploration, invites the audience to contemplate the temporal layers embedded within media technologies, fostering a deeper engagement with the materiality of sound and image. This work embodies my ongoing exploration as DUNYO of transport mechanisms and the affective qualities of analog media, connecting audiovisually to my broader research on local technicities, embodiment, virtualization, and cultural epistemologies across the Black Atlantic.