We all carry a phone in our pocket or bag – a small computer with a display, camera, microphone, and speaker. A device that encompasses essential technologies for media interpretation, reproduction, and participation. The QRchestra performance uses this interface in a concert and listening setting. Its participants take on the role of players in an orchestra, which doesn’t play from sheet music but from QR (Quick Response) codes.
With each performance, a new group of participants emerges, along with a new constellation of relationships with their personal devices. This symbiosis of human and machine includes us collectively as viewers, listeners, performers, and authors, but also as campers, hikers, tourists, excavators, farmers, cyclists, and city dwellers. In using mobile phones, we create new systems of orientation. We navigate their informational space of data flows as if moving through city streets. Whether at a crossroads, by a campfire in the forest, or in a cave, we remain in the ether, surrounded by kilobytes of a vibrating media field.
Maryia Kamarova is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans performance, scenography, sound art, and installation. She works with objects, DIY electronics, and is currently exploring the materiality of sound with a specific focus on the aesthetics and politics of technology. Maryia is one of the founders of the di.pole association and the art collective PYL. She graduated from the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theatre and has completed various internships in Expanded Scenography (HKU, Utrecht, 2022) and sound art (Overtoon, Brussels, 2019–2020; Sonoscopia, Porto, and the Institute of Ethnomusicology in Aveiro, 2023).
Veronika Svobodová is an audiovisual artist, musician, and scenographer. Her work approach combines installation and performance art with an original connection to theatrical scenography. She collaborates with prominent figures on both the international and Czech art scenes in theater and experimental music. Currently, she is part of the interdisciplinary duo SHRIMP, focused on exploring the subversive and transformative dimensions of sound with Pia Achternkamp (aka "loh"), a Berlin-based composer and multi-instrumentalist. She also works with the puppet theater group ŠŠŠ (Škrobotník, Šlundra, and Šibrová) alongside Robert Smolík and René Vitvar, and is part of the international collective PYL. She graduated from DAMU in Prague, where she now teaches in the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theatre.
temata.rozhlas.cz/veronika-svobodova-5364519
Ladislav Železný is a musician, curator, and audiovisual artist. He studied at the Secondary School of Ceramic Art and graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Brno University of Technology, specializing in video and multimedia. For several years, he worked as an assistant in audio applications and technology at the same university. Currently, he works at Czech Radio as a dramaturg, focusing on unconventional music and experimental radio production. He contributed as one of the creators of Lemurie TAZ radio, which is associated with the early days of the experimental space ROXY/NoD. His work focuses on various forms of acoustic art, and as a non-cellist, he advocates for the Left Hand Universe technique.
Matthieu Levet is a developer and electronic musician from Brussels. After earning a degree in economics and mathematics, he graduated from École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, specializing in media and graphic design. With his music project Carragenaan, he has performed across Northern and Eastern Europe, the United Kingdom, and Japan (Cafe Oto, Salon des Amateurs, Kraak Festival, Forestlimit Tokyo) and has toured with bands like Bear Bones Lay Low, Accou, Spoils & Relics, CIA Debutante, Descendeur, and Uj Bala. Levet is the founder of the Cold Moss label and is the creator of a series of shows on LYL and Lahmacun radio.
