Alvin Lucier

As mentioned in Sonic Acts, the experimental music of Alvin Lucier. He has samples on his site:

http://alucier.web.wesleyan.edu/listen.html

Artwork "fly-throughs" on Google Earth

Maybe everyone already knows about this:

Prado Museum in Google Earth

This is pretty cool. They have 12 paintings digitized in mega resolution that you can "fly through".

First you have to find the Museo Nacional Del Prado in Google Earth and then when you click on the building (have to have 3D Buildings enabled) a pop up presents the paintings. They have Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

I've been playing around with mapping a WiiMote to the movement controls, and to some sound, and running it through 3 projectors to make one big image... kinda fun, kinda silly. Very embodied. Almost nauseatingly so.

I thought about embedding the WiiMote in a funny hat, so that when you put it on, you can drive around the planet (or the Moon, or Mars, or the Solar System, or the Flight Simulator).

Maybe one of those "cheese" hats... and you have to search for 3D chunks of cheese on the moon.

Digital Harmony

This is a pretty good article about John Whitney and his concepts of digital harmony. It also has a video of one of his pieces.

http://njmcgee.wordpress.com/2007/07/27/john-whitney-and-digital-harmony/

Whitney Music Box

Here is a link to the Whitney music box I was talking about in class. The various dots move around the circle at different rates and trigger notes on a chromatic scale when then pass through a radius point of the circle.

http://wheelof.com/whitney/

D.V.D.

This is a video of the group D.V.D. that I talked about in class. The group consists of two drummers and a visualizer on a laptop. The two drummers controller the visuals by playing varioust drum patterns.

John Whitney "Catalog" 1961

You can find quite a bit of John Whitney's work on YouTube. This is Catalog, discussed in the reading.

"Early Abstractions" (1946-57), Pt. 2

I was looking for some of Jordan Belson's work and found this lovely piece of abstraction.

Existentialism

This is an amusing clip from The Pet Shop Boys on existentialism, which I thought relevant given our current readings.

"Aside from the fact that he insisted on incorporating extra vowels into his name and killed his wife's lover, Eadweard Muybridge was an unusual fellow. Long before the word movie even existed, he was playing around with stop-motion animation; devising ways to freeze sequences of motion and then reanimate them."

Muybridge exhibition featured on NPR:

http://n.pr/9HUvhb

DSCP by Atau Tanaka

http://www.ataut.net/site/DSCP

This a musical piece composed by Atau Tanaka for chamber orchestra and two electronic instruments.

S.S.S, a trio performing visual music with sensors and gestures

This piece is titled lifting and is performed by Atau Tanaka, Cecile Babiole and Laurent Dailleau. The group uses theramins,ultrasound sensors, and gel electrodes to create a musical and visual performance that embodies the groups collective movements.

Intersection with Classical Music

Here is a clip of John Cage's Work:



Here is a clip of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage:



I also found some images of how John Cage's music is notated:



Also mentioned in the chapter is Russolo's Ballet Mechanique, set to the Fernand Leger film.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SgsqmQJAq0


This is a piece I've known and liked since undergrad music school, using metronomes and randomness:



And finally, the trautonium. First is a clip of Hindemith's Concertino Per Trautonium, 3rd movement. Second is a clip of someone playing the instrument alone.

As mentioned in the Salter book, the Hyposurface:

http://bit.ly/NNZZI

Entanglements 1 | formal scene/machine extensions to live cinema practice

I present the following video selections in support of our discussions of the first chapter, "Space 1: Scene/Machine (1876-1933)" of Chris Salter's Entangled.

First up, Moholy-Nagy's "Ein Lichtspiel: Schwarz Weiss Grau" (1930).



At Sonic Acts XIII, Moholy-Nagy's film was followed up by a performance from Optical Machines, whose "SHIFT" led the concept of Moholy-Nagy-esque filmic sculptures into a live cinema format -- a direction that is more or less the theme of this post.



http://www.opticalmachines.nl/

I'm interested in tracking connections between this early history of architecture, staged performance (particularly as it begins to intersect or be informed by/become entangled with early cinematic innovation), music, light, technology, and the presence or absence of performing bodies in the face of these changes. When I read Salter's description of Bruno Taut's Der Welthaumeister (The World Builder): a series of "black-and-white drawing accompanied by music depicting the gradual emergence and transformation of an architectural form traveling through space" (2010: 27), I was reminded of Monolake Live Surround -- Robert Henke (audio) and Tarik Barri (visuals) -- at Sonic Acts XIII.



I would also like to present the formal light/sound play of Haswell & Hecker's "UPIC Diffusion Session #22" as a sonic-visual Futurism updated for the post-Tron age. There was something very war-like about this piece, too, which occasionally suggested prop-driven planes on the verge of crashing (thinking of Mayakovsky's Victory Over the Sun with a plane diving into the stage years before the Pink Floyd did something similar), or crazy laser searchlights scouring a wireframe battlefield (Tron or the old Tank game came to mind), all piercing through this hazy, dusty/foggy landscape, before turning into laser beams shooting through the heads of the crowd on the floor and up into the balcony. At any rate, this was an intensely "retro-futuristic" performance, and it works for me as evocative of my readings of the first chapter of Salter's Entangled, which conjures up so many images and extrapolations of future's past and past futures. It's very interesting to me how the introduction of new technologies and their intersections with bodies, with space, with light and sound, almost invariably impress themselves on technoculture through the speculative imagination and science fictions more specifically.



As obsessed as I am with cosmic art/media, I'm especially drawn to Salter's descriptions of Taut's work and its "shining world" and endless theater of the future -- I recall that Jordan Belson and Henry Jacobs described their work in the Morrison Planetarium for the Vortex Concerts in similar terms, as well as described how the highly technologized space of the dome had become an "exquisite instrument." This language resonates with some of the Constructivist approaches, particularly Meyerhold and Popova's collaborations, which not only made the stage what they called "a workplace for the actors" but also "a kind of performance instrument," even specifically a "keyboard for the performers" (Rudnitsky in Salter 18), that took advantage of what Meyerhold called "biomechanics." These connections are all too much, I'm seeing cyborgs in space with mood organs, again.

But I'm getting off track. The shining world of Taut's The World Builder not only evokes the strange black-and-white architectures of the Monolake Surround set (I was compelled by so much black, white and gray work at Sonic Acts!), but also this notion of "architectural performance without actors," and how this proto-cinematic experience is invested with ideas about "an infinite, mystical, transcendental reality" (27). This leads me to one last connection to one of the stand-out live cinema performances I encountered at Sonic Acts: Jürgen Reble & Thomas Köner's "Materia Obscura." The cracked film surface with its chemogram content -- such basic forms but such vivid color-fields -- suggest something of the limitless spaces Taut evokes, the stage disappearing through screen into this place without edges that, as Salter describes Taut's desired work, extends "beyond the realms of perception," where "the architectural form appeared and then shattered into atomic pieces, dancing as particles through Taut's mystical, cosmological universe and then eventually coalesced into a sparkling glass cathedral" (28). Reble and Köner's performance never quite builds the cathedral, except perhaps the skyglobe that concludes the piece, or is this an earth from a distance, dotted by the multiple tribal firesides for deep psychedelic ritual that cropped up throughout, and where, as Taut would have it, "colors and form would sound and carry their tone as pure undisturbed elements of the infinite" (in Salter 28). That was the mystery of this piece, that it all seemed to be falling apart, cracking before my eyes, and yet it seemed neither disturbed nor disturbing, and a world was built.

The cathedral, at least as it appeared at Sonic Acts, came later, and if glass (as it seemed), it not only sparkled but shattered in the highly disturbing noise of Makino Takashi & Jim O’Rourke "Still in Cosmos," but that's another post, perhaps. For now, "Materia Obscura."



Well, I'm probably reading too inauthentically here, but I'm striving toward a synthesis that builds from Salter's history of Futurist, Constructivist, Expressionist, Bauhaus theater to the live cinema practices that I witnessed and heared at Sonic Acts XIII. I'm interested in the way that live cinema breaks two barriers: first, particularly for the musician, the barrier between stage and the audience; second, for the visual artist, between projection booth and screen. At Sonic Acts, the audio and visual performers (usually a duo, occasionally a solo act), was set up in the middle of the crowd. For instance, for the Monolake set, there were people dancing or milling about on a platform behind the performers at their same level, while other dancers, right in the heart of the surround mix, were lower, on the floor, than the performers. For the Optical Machines set, I was glad to be behind the performers, and I was so intrigued by the little mechanical set-up the one guy was using that I ended up watching that more than the projected footage. So, Salter is resonating for me as I think both of these earlier theater performances breaking the barriers between stage/audience that they had inherited from the theatrical traditions; from the other direction, I'm feeling Salter's history resonate backward in time from a more robust and widespread avant-garde cinema to these quasi-cinematic proto-lightshows and abstract, often human-less, machinic performances.