The Embodiment of the Ephemeral
Live Performance / Software
The Embodiment of the Ephemeral is a live performance in which an artist interacts with a continuously reconfiguring software system, generating sound and moving images. In this context, the software’s structure is not conceived as linear or stable; rather, it is deliberately designed to change, to remain ephemeral and incomplete.
The work situates itself in a liminal space between human control and machine autonomy. Here it investigates the tension between our urge to subordinate technology to specific purposes and the intrinsic tendency of technology to alter our intentions, reshaping decision-making and agency, often according to unpredictable and non-linear logics. Within this scenario, the performance becomes a moment of emergence and discovery: a constant dialogue between artist and algorithm, composed of negotiations, deviations, and reciprocal adaptations.
In the work, the software is not celebrated as an anthropomorphic artificial intelligence nor as a complex, layered system. Instead, it is conceived as a network of elementary processes in continuous transformation, whose complexity emerges precisely from their instability and incompleteness. Although the code cannot evolve autonomously in a biological sense, it is through interaction with the artist that it acquires vitality. Within this shared ecology between human and machine, the core of the work is revealed: a reciprocal process in which the artist shapes the software, while the software, in turn, transforms the artist’s sensitivity and perception.
Ephemerality and incompleteness, therefore, are not reduced to engineering concepts, but become the foundation of a distinct aesthetic: a space in which sonic and visual forms surface, mutate, and dissolve. The boundaries between code, sound, and image become porous, giving rise to a continuous flow in which ephemerality and incompleteness assert themselves as both aesthetic and conceptual qualities: a fragile equilibrium, always on the verge of collapse, yet capable of generating fleeting moments of harmony.
Credits
- Year: 2025
- Composer/Performer/Programmer: Francesco Corvi
All works · francescocorvi.com
