Fingerprints at Cork Midsummer Festival

Music, movement and visuals respond to one another in real time — nothing planned, nothing repeated, happening only once.

On 21 June 2026 — the final day of Cork Midsummer Festival — we performed Fingerprints twice at Triskel Christchurch, Cork, with Ioana Petcu-Colan, Lina Andonovska, Alex Petcu, Ross Lyness, and Davide Marinelli.

From the festival’s description of the work:

The Triskel Arts Centre is a repurposed church, steeped in history. There is a stage on which the screen is fixed, but the musicians are free — roaming through the audience and up to the balcony above. A dancer moves through the space. The projected visuals are created in the moment, from both the surrounding sound and movement. Seated in the old church pews, you might find yourself swivelling round to follow the sound or the movement — that’s all part of the experience.

What is Fingerprints?

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, 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. Here, “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.

Responses

Critic Nicki ffrench Davis wrote:

There’s lots to enjoy in Fingerprints… Fingerprints was captivating from start to finish, and despite not being promoted as a family event, kept the attention of all present…

And these notes from audience member Lucy Healy-Kelly:

Fingerprints arises out of nowhere, sound arriving seconds before image. We take our seats along the pews of Triskel’s Christchurch, the lights are dimmed but it is not fully dark. On the stage in front of us, the visual artist sits behind his laptop, expectant. The musicians are, for now, shadowy presences, half-seen.

From a pulpit space above the audience, the violin is the first sound to emerge, and from those first notes the screen pings to life. There is something quietly epic about it, almost tentative at first, but as the violin finds the line of its tune, so too do the lines on screen. What follows is a 45-minute journey where the interplay of sound and vision literally ebbs and flows between the performers and their respective instruments.

More about the project, including earlier performances, is at performancefingerprints.com.