visual piano @ live cinema sao paolo

Visual Piano

The visual piano is an instrument which makes it possible to create moving images in a space. It is unique and was conceived and developed by the photographer and light installation artist Kurt Laurenz Theinert in collaboration with the software designers Roland Blach and Philip Rahlenbeck.

Using a MIDI-keyboard it is possible to generate varying graphic patterns which can be digitally projected onto one or more screens. These dynamic and immediate drawings in light are not (as with VJ soft-and Hardware) generated by pre-recorded clips, but every moment of the performance is being played and modulated live and in real time via the keyboard and pedals.

Collaboration between MIGUEL BARELLA and THOMAS ROHRER – free improvisation and noise music duo.



About the artists


Kurt Laurenz Theinert is photographer and light artist, concentrates in his work on visual experiences that do not refer, as images, to anything. On the contrary, he is striving for an abstract, reductiv aesthetic that has ultimately led him – through a wish for more dematerialisation – from photography to light as a medium. Close collaboration sound artists and musicians have enriched his work not only by adding another, non- material medium – sound – it has also promoted constant refining and monitoring of his own artistic stance.

Swiss musician Thomas Rohrer (saxophone, violin and fiddle) cultivates, in Brazil, a work that roams openly through free improvisation, jazz and regional music.

Miguel Barella’s career path has taken him from the iconic Agentss to the Voluntários da Pátria post-punk, always defined by experimentalism. In his recent works, Miguel has increasingly dedicated himself to the pursuit of a guitar-based language of his own, steeped in real-time sound processing.

The product of the duo’s collaboration has been an extreme – and contrasting – sense of creative freedom. That was the initial focus of the Rohrer-Barella duo. Sound engineer Miguel processes and mixes Thomas’ fiddle and sax improvisations, interjecting imponderable digressions and electronic overdubs over his Swiss companion’s grounded, natural tones.