Fingerprints: Cork Midsummer Festival

Ioana Petcu-Colan (violin/viola), Steve Meyfroidt (visuals), Lina Andonovska (flutes), Alex Petcu (percussion), Ross Lyness (trombone) and Davide Marinelli (dance/movement)

Fingerprints is a fully improvised live performance experience, where music, drawing and movement interact in real time. A truly unique experience where nothing is fixed in advance.

Performers move freely among the audience, weaving violin, viola, flutes, percussion and trombone into a soundscape that feels both contemporary and nostalgic. On a large screen: a fluid, hypnotic, bio-digital world is created using custom-built software that responds symbiotically to the evolving music and movement.

Every performance is distinct, and the audience is integral to this shared, multi-sensory creative process where sound, image, gesture and atmosphere emerge in response to the present moment.

Fingerprints is part of ongoing collaborative research that explores drawing as a responsive system shaped by sound, movement and live performance. At its core is a custom-built computational drawing system that reacts in real time to acoustic instruments and gesture. Rather than treating audio and video as simple control signals, it is tuned to register nuance (intensity, articulation, rhythm, and texture) so that marks emerge through interaction and improvisation.

The resulting visuals are residue rather than representation – records of interaction over time. In this context, “fingerprints” refers not to biometrics, but to the human specificity of live performance: timing, touch, hesitation and collaboration – traces of decisions made together in the moment.

Supported by an MTU Arts Office Create Le Chéile Arts Project Award.