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How can you tell what’s real — what’s happening right in front of you, versus a manipulated recording?

Cinema alum Gregg Biermann ‘91 and Associate Professor of Cinema Monteith McCollum will explore that question in “Renditions for Violin & Electronics,” a multimedia performance that will close the 2023 . The festival will be held Oct. 21 at the Spool Contemporary Art Space in Johnson City.

A visual arts professor at Bergen Community College in New Jersey, Biermann is an experimental filmmaker who has shown his work as part of the ������ý Cinema Department’s visiting artist series. He and McCollum have collaborated on sound projects previously, through a kind of remote exchange.

“I would start something and then send to him a few files, and then he would add on to it and send it back, and we’d kind of gradually complete the composition like a long chess game, except Gregg always got the last move,” McCollum said.

Biermann has worked with other composers and performers of various kinds through the years. Considering a new multimedia project about six months ago, McCollum sprang to mind. Both have participated in Transient Visions before, showcasing their creative work.

“Monty is an accomplished musician as well as a filmmaker. He specializes in the violin, although he plays multiple instruments, including bagpipes, piano and guitar,” Biermann said.

He filmed McCollum playing the violin from various angles, many of them close-ups of his hands, the strings and the bow. These images have been broken into small video samples that can be launched from a MIDI device, allowing them to be triggered and played.

During the performance, the two will stand about 20 feet apart: Biermann manipulating the prerecorded samples and McCollum playing his violin, responding to the sound samples. Meanwhile, prerecorded images connected with the sound samples will play on the back wall, as will images captured in real-time from a tiny camera mounted on McCollum’s instrument.

The idea is to blur the distinction between live and recorded performance, they explained.

“The creative part is happening while people are experiencing it, as opposed to filmmaking, where all the creative decisions are made beforehand and then you present it to the audience,” Biermann mused. “There’s a certain daredevil quality because you could easily mess it up.”

Collaborations such as this one underscore why Biermann still considers ������ý’s Cinema Department to be home, even though it has changed a great deal through the decades.

“One commonality is the love and emphasis of experimentation, which has been the same since its inception in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the present moment,” he said.