For its tenth edition Clujotronic brought back three artists from the festival's own history: Alex Halka from Romania, Matthieu Tercieux from France, and myself. The brief was open, which is to say there was not one. We were asked to make something together that none of us would have made alone.
What came out of it was Infected Hardware, an interactive audiovisual mapping piece in the courtyard of the Cluj Art Museum. For three evenings the courtyard worked as an experimental laboratory rather than a stage: the facade carried the projection, the audience could act on it, and the three of us ran it live.
"Three of the artists who shaped the festival's history, Alex Halka (RO), Kiritan Flux (DE) and Matthieu Tercieux (FR), answered the challenge of creating an original interactive digital art project together. That is how Infected Hardware came about."
That is the organisers' own description, translated from the Romanian, and it is fairly close to how it felt.
I had played Clujotronic in 2014, 2015 and 2016, every time with Alex. The festival has a habit of putting people in a room to see what happens, which is how the first of those started: 48 hours to build an audiovisual set with a musician I had never met. Ten years on, the method had not changed.
Festival aftermovie, 1 to 3 October 2021, Cluj Art Museum.