Argiartean Festival 2023

Visual Artists Desilence and musicians TMATNB worked together to produce an incredibly high-definition real-time concert for festivalgoers at this year’s Argiartean Festival.

On the 6th and 7th of October 2023, Desilence collaborated with TMATNB (The Morning After the Night Before), a self-described “electrohangover” band from Barcelona, to make audio-reactive projection-mapped visuals for San Sebastián’s second Argiartean (Basque for “In the Light”) Festival, which promotes experimental art and the avant-garde with monumental projections and light-art installations.

Søren Christensen and Tatiana Halbach of Desilence worked with the band to develop a sound and vision in complete harmony with one another. Over several creative conversations feeding off each others’ ideas, they devised video loops in Kaiber, which they then analysed in real-time with Notch, adding particles and other features to shape their creations and form a unified look in real time.

The team used the city’s Iesu Church, a starkly minimalist 21st-century building, as their canvas. As Christensen explains, “It’s basically a huge, white screen giving you about 1,400 square metres to work with.” They used Christie Digital’s Griffyn series projectors to map the final images onto the church while the band played an hour-long set.

Six thousand attendees had the chance to see the artists’ psychedelic mixtures of colour and music, which were well-received. The duo and band plan to adapt their presentation to other locations in the coming months.