Customer Care, an 8-hour interactive concert for the Lahore Digital Art Festival

On the last day of winter 2021, FabLab Ostiense was the stage for one of our most innovative artistic productions in the field of contemporary music.

The Metadiapason Collective, as always able to express its “undisciplined art” overcoming any canon and convention, gave rise to an interactive performance, lasting exactly 8 hours, which managed to involve dozens of artists from all over the world and several thousand spectators connected on the web and social channels where the live broadcast was diffused.

The event was part of the programme of the Lahore Digital Art Festival (Pakistan), which this year had as its theme Post Reality — a term referring to the fact that our old understanding of reality is no longer applicable, and it is no longer simple to grasp the layers of reality and distinguish what “real” really means.

The work staged, titled “Customer Care”, was an interactive musical performance, conceived as part of a broader investigation into the actions of daily life, considered liturgies of modern human beings.

Through an effect of immersion, estrangement and identification, the performance generated different artistic processes by engaging the audience with sounds, images and gestures belonging to modern rituals.

Performed at the Ostiense Campus, close to our FabLab, the action was articulated mainly online thanks to P.I.C.O. (acronym of Performance Interactive Control Operator), an artificial intelligence developed by Chirale to connect home users with the musicians engaged in the performance.

From 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., three performers at a time alternated in the equipped hall, each responsible for a different specific musical line (melodic, polyphonic and timbral), kitted out as switchboard operators of a typical call centre — with headphones, microphone and station bordered by dividers, in a room with a shop window.

The eight-hour duration was a clear symbolic reference to the standard working-day commitment, but it also allowed broad audience participation: anyone could interact with the P.I.C.O. chatbot to send instructions to the musicians or request to take part live as an additional performer.

The recording of the entire event is available on our YouTube channel.