Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

In this work, a projection paper screen was simultaneously a “musical instrument”, a tricycle full of toys was a prop and a musical instrument, and the umbrella man was a performer as well as a musician. The performers had no lines. They were “silent,” and only sounds made from the musical instruments, toys and everyday objects were heard. From nothing to something, the performers composed and played the music, following the theatrical design of the director and the lighting. Although it had no concrete story, the visual construction, the bodily movements, and the sounds formed a series of poetic, narrative images. It was creative but not eager to please the audience. The work demonstrated another kind of percussion performance, and was a small but exquisite performance in the field of the black box theater. (Commentator: CHEN Hui-Mei)

Artwork Introduction

Floaters playground is a production created by five members with a background in percussion. Starting from the idea of “sound experiment,” they have brought together directors, lighting designers, and body movement instructors from the fields of theatre and dance into the production, as an attempt to expand their creative horizon to think about and explore the boundary and nature of music from different perspectives. 

The creators renounce the standard symbiotic model between musicians and musical instruments, and step away from habitual expectation of listening to music, but instead adopt a range of theatrical imagination to reproduce a large-scale sound-making installation (similar to a guitar amplifier and strings), a tricycle for scavenging, and explore a range of non-instrumental sounds, such as tearing up paper, rubbing glass jars against walls (similar to object music), and layering of rubbing sounds produced by spatial materials (using wireless contact microphones to pick up these sounds in the space of the performance to be processed real-time with a computer program). Moreover, the production is created according to the space of Guling Street Avant-garde Theatre. Together with clever ideas of lighting design and the use of light and shadow, music is hidden or transformed to freely flow through the audience as well as the performers in different forms as visual and sonic experiences through an open script.

Floaters playground marks the first time that iOFloat embarks on an adventurous journey that takes them out of their “music comfort zone” to question their familiar field as well as discover and enjoy more fun and possibility for modern music and its performance.

About the Artist

iOFloat began in Taiwan, and after enriching their experiences through studying in Europe for many years, the members return to where they started with their passion and perseverance in modern music and performing arts. Viewing the nature of sound as their core, they hope to collaborate with different fields of art as a way to develop and explore the possibility of arts and culture as well as nurture and cultivate the contemporary spiritual wealth belonging to this land. Freely meandering through the world of musical art and reaching out to different fields and stepping out of the comfort zone is spirit of iOFloat.