Visual Phonic is a project that was born in 2016 as a result of an agreement between the DJ and music selector Javier Verdes, founder of the legendary record store Verdes Records, and the Filmoteca de Catalunya. With the aim of attracting a younger audience to classic film sessions, Verdes was in charge of providing live sound for around thirty classic silent films with electronic music. But the idea was to extrapolate the project, which ended up in modern art museums, cultural forums or spaces as unique and emblematic as the auditorium of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, or the Museum of Modern Art in Ibiza.
Then the pandemic arrived and the schemes were broken. Until Visual Phonic jumped from the movie theater to a more social, more interactive space. This is how the initial plan has become another 360º immersive one that will be presented this Thursday, February 29, in a pioneering event at La Nau, a music creation space located in Poblenou.
It is a revolutionary installation with a vibrating floor and three-dimensional sound that immerses the viewer in a unique sensory world through a special tribute to Fritz Lang’s classic Metropolis (1927), with a creative reinterpretation of the film. “We have been working on the project for six months and our goal is to get it up and running so we can document it and see its potential. Metropolis is a super iconic piece that has influenced many films,” Giovanni Jubert, executive director, tells this newspaper.
The event will take place in three sessions, with three consecutive screenings. The first is private, with press and cultural agents and programmers among the guests. And the other two will have a general public “from our agenda.” In total about 50 people per session. “We have designed an immersive space made up of two screens 12 meters long by five meters high and with curved shapes and the viewer is placed inside the two screens,” explains Fausto Morales, artistic director with 30 years of experience in the visual arts.
They opted for a science fiction icon like Metropolis because “it is futuristic and we reinterpreted it almost a hundred years later, and we have updated it to the 21st century. We have given it a new reading and made it sensory, going from the original 153 minutes to one hour and five minutes each session,” says Morales, in charge of the immersive staging. “The film has very interesting sets of shots and counter-shots. What we have done is put the shots on one screen and the counter-shots on another. We have given them a physical space so that the visitor can stand in the middle and enjoy it as long as you want. There is a reinterpretation of the film into which we divided it, there is an editing treatment and we have applied very subtle reactive audio effects depending on the script. On a sensory level there is a novelty and that is that it is very immersive. Not only will you “You walk through a space where there are projections and sound. Your body physically receives vibrations from music that is exclusive. It is digitalized vinyl music,” he explains.
The project is conceived as an artistic installation “that we want to present at film, light and electronic music festivals. In addition, the sensory element is inclusive of the deaf-mute collective, which is always excluded from music festivals. This experience is so brutal that even deaf people can perceive it,” he says. And the vibrating floor consists of a technology by Triple Onda – a Catalan sound company that develops very avant-garde sound systems – that dampens decibels of volume due to vibrations that emanate from platforms that offer the viewer an immersive sound experience. “The fourth person who is part of Visual Phonic is Stephane Rodicq, a sound engineer who has designed these technologies composed of the latest generation of acoustic and haptic solutions,” explains Jubert.
The organizers of the event highlight above all the great work behind this immersive project that they want to “circulate internationally. The objective is to distribute it.” And they conclude: “On an artistic level we are very happy. We believe it is a risky and daring bet. Because we have chosen a film that is a classic and we have dared to dismantle it.”