Raw Material

Raw Material is Roberto Musci’s independent label and creative platform, founded in 1983.

Originally established as a record label, Raw Material has developed over the years into an open and evolving space for the production, publication and distribution of audio, video and multimedia works, audiovisual installations and experimental digital projects.

The label has released two LPs and has also served as a framework for research into interactive media, live performance and video art.

Raw Material is conceived as a continuous work-in-progress: a laboratory for hybrid artistic languages in which composition, technology, image, gesture and performance converge.

Audiopainting 

Audiopainting is a real-time audiovisual practice developed through interactive digital environments such as Quartz Composer and other media-processing systems. By establishing a dynamic relationship between sound and image, it enables visual and sonic elements to interact, influence one another and evolve continuously during a performance.

The process is based on a continuous interaction between visual and sonic data. Colours, movement and other visual information are captured by a camera, while sound is recorded through microphones or generated electronically. Parameters such as frequency, timbre, pitch, envelope, delay and reverberation are then analysed or processed in real time.

These two dimensions continuously influence and transform one another: sounds transform images by altering colour, speed, delay, layering, multiplication and movement, while images in turn influence the structure and behaviour of the music.

The result is a live feedback loop between sound and image — a form of real-time audiovisual painting in which music generates images and images reshape music.

Audiopainting has been used in multimedia installations, live concerts, audiovisual performances and collaborative projects with musicians and performers.

Thales' Dream

Thales’ Dream is an interactive video and music project inspired by Thales of Miletus and his philosophical conception of water as the origin and foundation of the world.

The work combines live electronics, extended electric guitar and real-time video processing. The guitar is equipped with sensors connected to an iPad, allowing the performer’s gestures to influence the sound and visual environment.

The visual environment is constructed from images of water suspended above and reflected upon other watery surfaces..The project reflects on Thales’ cosmological idea that the Earth rests upon water and that motion, life and matter are connected through hidden forces.

In Thales’ Dream, philosophical speculation becomes an audiovisual landscape: water, sound, gesture and image circulate within a continuously evolving interactive system.

Ghost Train

Ghost Train is an Audiopainting project conceived as a tribute to the Lumière brothers and tone of the foundational images of early cinema:  L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat. from 1897.

The work evokes the anonymous figures waiting on the platform, imagining their presence as a trace suspended in cinematic history. The work evokes the anonymous figures waiting on the platform, imagining them as traces suspended in cinematic history. They become ghosts of the moving image, transmitted through time, memory and projection.

Through real-time video manipulation and live music, Ghost Train transforms an iconic image from early cinema into an audiovisual meditation on memory, technology, spectatorship and the persistence of images across generations.

Astolfo on the Moon

Astolfo on the Moon is a multimedia project rooted in the Sicilian opera dei pupi tradition, reimagined through real-time computer graphics, cameras, sensors and live music

The work takes inspiration from the episode of Astolfo’s journey to the Moon in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. In the poem, Orlando is driven mad by his unrequited love for Angelica. Astolfo travels to the Moon, where everything lost on Earth is preserved, including Orlando’s sanity.

The  project transforms this literary and theatrical material into a contemporary audiovisual performance. Traditional marionettes interact with digital technologies, creating a dialogue between epic narrative, folk theatre, live music and real-time image processing.

Astolfo on the Moon explores madness, memory, loss and recovery through a hybrid stage language in which ancient storytelling meets interactive media.

Alchemy

Alchemy is a live interactive performance inspired by Western alchemical thought, the idea of prima materia, the anima mundi and the symbolic stages of transformation associated with the Great Work: nigredo, albedo, citrinitas and rubedo.

The project uses computer-generated images created in real time through technologies using software environments and technologies including Quartz Composer, eMotion, Processing, Java, video cameras capturing live inputs and Kinect sensors.

The projected imagery is transformed by live music and by the performers’ movements. In turn, visual data modifies the music, producing a continuously evolving audiovisual feedback loop.

Alchemy turns the alchemical process into a performative system: matter becomes image, image becomes sound, sound becomes gesture, and gesture generates new forms of transformation in time and space.

Chrono Photograpy

Chronophotography is an Audiopainting project based on digital algorithms and Quartz Composer filters, in which music modifies the speed, repetition and created through digital algorithms and custom Quartz Composer filters.

The work refers to the historical technique of chronophotography, developed in the 19th century to capture multiple phases of movement within a sequence of images. Figures such as Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey used this method to study human and animal motion, creating a visual language that anticipated cinema.

Movement in Gold , Amaranth and Purple are no longer simply recorded; it is fragmented, multiplied, accelerated and transformed by sound.

Wraiths , Ghosts and Presences

Wraiths, Ghosts and Presences is a series of videos and musical works inspired by the writings of H. P. Lovecraft.

The project draws on the atmosphere of cosmic horror found in Lovecraft’s writing, including invisible presences, unstable perception and encounters with unknown entities.

Through electronic sound, processed images and real-time digital transformation, the work evokes apparitions, spectral figures and spaces suspended between memory, fear and imagination.

Wraiths, Ghosts and Presences explores the threshold between the visible and the invisible, using Audiopainting as a tool for generating uncanny audiovisual environments.

A tribute to Zugakousaku

A Tribute to Zugakousaku is dedicated to the creative practice of Japanese artist and designer Mamoru Kano, whose work brings together software development, computer graphics, visual design and spatial installation.

Kano is graduated of Tohoku University of Art and Design, Kano has worked across software development, computer graphics, visual design, interface design and installation art.His practice connects technological experimentation with visual expression, integrating digital tools into artistic and design contexts.

He has exhibited video works and spatial installations in museums and exhibitions in Japan and internationally, and is also known as a founding member of WOW Inc.

The tribute reflects an interest in the relationship between visual systems, generative graphics, digital environments and sound-based artistic research.