Crushed NOW
Audio Performances as AI-Generated Videos // Interventions for a 5-Part Concert Series of Spatial Musicology
Created as an audiovisual overture for a concert series on Spatial Musicology at Funkhaus Berlin, Eldagsen’s work introduces a new artistic workflow. Starting from the conceptual framework of each concert, he produced AI-generated images as personal interpretations of its themes: Negotiations, Temporal Compression, Infrastructural Presence, Vocal Systems, and Relational Persistence. These images were then animated through text prompts describing imagined sound performances, with sound and video generated simultaneously in Seedance 2. The result is an autonomous work that stages an audiovisual performance of something that never actually happened.
Boris’ videos don’t illustrate the music of the “Crushed NOW” concerts, but create a parallel interpretation of the themes.
About the “Crushed NOW” concerts:
Crushed Now — After Turing // Beyond Presence is a five-evening concert series at Kultursaal, Funkhaus Berlin, framed as a platform for “hybrid relational spaces” between instruments, technology, and spatial audio.
The project treats instrumentality not as control over a tool, but as a relational practice in which bodies, apparatuses, algorithms, speakers, rooms, and audiences co-produce the musical situation. The series uses 3D audio, spatialized sound, expanded instruments, AI-video installations, DJ sets, improvisation, and hybrid performance to dissolve the lazy binary of human versus machine. Its artists come from contemporary and early music, coding, DJ-ing, electroacoustic composition, performance, and AI-video, working in changing constellations across the five concerts.
At its core, Crushed Now asks what “presence” means when sound, gesture, attention, and agency are distributed across human and non-human actors rather than owned by one heroic performer.
The series is organized by spaes lab, Gerriet K Sharma and Verena Lercher.
I // Post-Test Operations — “After Turing // After Evaluation // After Proof”
Eldagsen created four videos that explore these questions from different perspectives: What counts as an instrument? How do the performers negotiate their roles? And who leads whom?
4 Single Channel Videos:
II // Temporal Compression — time as density, layering, collision; presence under pressure
What is time? What gives structure? Is structure freedom or a cage?
Trailer (3-channel video)
III // Distributed Presence — infrastructural presence shared between human and artificial actors
Is the location an infrastructure? What moves and who is the mover?
To be released late June 2026
IV // Vocal Systems — voice and gesture detached from bodies and redistributed across systems, spaces, and media
Animal vs human vs synthetic voices.
To be released September 2026
V // Relational Persistence — performance as persistent relation rather than bounded event; “no Ending // no Closure”
To be released October 2026