Urban Skin: k-frame 1.07
by Ogino_knauss / K-labo (IT)

Ogino Knauss is a collective active since 1995. Born as “mutant cinema laboratory”, acts during the years as a constant drift through audiovisual languages and communication practices. The group experiments with VJing techniques as a peculiar form of open narrative, in contrast to the dominant tendency to create video tapestries as an ornament to musician and DJ’s production.

Developing its action at the crossing point between the exploration of etherotopic spaces and the exhibition of disclosing practices of the audiovisual device, Ogino knauss led a steady exploration of new spatial and creative contexts to confront, such as cultural centres, public spaces, temporary occupied zones, art galleries, festivals, dance floors.

Among many others ogi:no knauss collaborated or played live sessions with: Autechre, Autobam, Vladislav Delay, DJ Ultracore, Masami Akita & Zbigniew Karkowski, Otolab, OTK, Rich Medina, Terre Thaemlitz. In more recent projects, the attention has been focused on the globalizing urban landscape, applying image production techniques in the attempt to develop innovative listening and description practices about urban processes.

Urban skin is a live audio video performance expressly proposed for Cimatics. It derives from the convergence of two projects and two groups: Ogino-knauss is a trio of artist /architects working since years on innovative forms of representation of urban landscape, developing VJing and live media applied to psycho geographical exploration. K-labo is a factory researching on software and web solutions that are developing an innovative software tool, called K-frame, to live manage multiple picture sequences.

Urban skin is a documentation process developed by ogino_knauss through photographic assessments, deploying a nomadic, flaneur attitude about the transforming global urban landscape. Urban skin refers to an instinctive attitude to look at epidermic phenomena, at superficial characters -not necessarily in a negative sense- as public manifestations of inner tensions, as the emergence of processes undergoing the surface. Acting as urban dermatologists, we try to read through the city’s skin - through its physical and social diaphragm - the deeper transformation occurring in its body. Surfaces, signs and flows are the basic elements we focus on to compose a picture of this fast evolving landscape.

It is a reflection on the public and the private, on the individual and the social, on the visible and the invisible of urban life. In the live performance proposed for Cimatics, we will test the potentiality of the software k-frame to manage a stack of images coming from this explorative process and to reorganize them in a narrative set employing a soundtrack produced from field recordings and other significant samples.

• – Ogino_knauss website