Computer Baroque - online exhibition - 2009

Computer Baroque - curated by Richard Wright.
online exhibition from 14 April to 14 July 2009

"Animate Projects presents Computer Baroque, an online exhibition, curated by Richard Wright. Computer Baroque is a selection of defining works in the history of artists’ digital moving image. Rarely seen, they represent a period – the late eighties and early nineties - in which computer animation was the focus for the most audacious and exuberant experiments across all areas of new media, art and technology...
The Computer Baroque programme screened at Tate Modern on 20 March 2009; the majority of those works are now showing here from 14 April to 14 July 2009. Programme notes by curator Richard Wright."

See: http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_project/computer_baroque/baroque

Programme Note

..."featuring pioneers Karl Sims, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, William Latham, Beriou, John Tonkin, Chris Landreth, Peter Callas, Simon Biggs, Ruth Lingford, James Duesing, Paul Garrin, Shelley Lake, The Butler Brothers and Jason White & Richard Wright."

See also: Essay by Richard Wright
Computer Baroque: Computer animation 1987–1995 by Richard Wright (2009)

This Narrator is Blind

YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiajnXGQjBw
[Italy]

This Narrator is Blind - Experimental Video

The title of the video refers to the legend of Homerus, the ancient greek author, who wrotes beautiful poems, although he was blind. 

"the video it's , let's say, an accidental video; I was very sad and nervous, filming the sun behind some leaves, till I saw these fast and continuously changing figures... I thought that my camera was going crazy, like myself. Than , some months later, I recorded a guitar base, and edited those images on the music." 

Video Artist: Ruggero

YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiajnXGQjBw

http://www.myspace.com/spicchio
http://www.vimeo.com/user138786
[Italy]

Iota Center - YouTube Channel

http://www.youtube.com/user/iotacenter
"iota is a public benefit, non-profit arts organization founded in 1994 on the premise that this wide range of techniques and titles share common aesthetic goals which unite them into a single art of light and movement today generally known as "Visual Music."
"iota is dedicated to preserving, promoting and uniting the dynamic world of visual music through our various programs: research, publication, preservation, exhibition and distribution. Our programs together celebrate this art form from its earliest appearance through its current expression with the latest technologies."
For more information, please visit our website at www.iotacenter.org

Videos on the iotacenter channel at present (April 2009) are works from the filmartist Stephanie Maxwell.

"Stephanie Maxwell has been creating stunningly beautiful and original experimental animation for over twenty years. As a film artist who specializes in hand painting and engraving directly onto the surface of 35mm film stock, Maxwell employs a wide variety of materials and tools, including paints, markers, bleach, stencils, engraving tools, airbrush and many more experimental techniques."



Stephanie Maxwell, Animated Works (1984-2007) can be purchased from Iotacenter at:
http://www.iotacenter.org/kinetica/maxwell

Jan Dybala - Vrgb

Vrgb - visual music composition #002

Excerpts from a live mixing session performed on 8 VCR decks with some analog feedback/delay effects.
Jan Dybala JD Video on Vimeo.


Vrgb VHS Visual Music Composition n.002 from Jan Dybala JD Video on Vimeo.

see also:
http://www.jandybala.com/
Bones Magazine
Art of Artifacts by Rosa Menkman

Call for Works - Back to Basics

No figuration, only dots and lines as ends in themselves. The "most abstract" festival in the world posses a creative challenge to study and reflect upon the essence of form and movement.



Mad-Actions and The iotaCenter present "PUNTO Y RAYA 2009"

"The "most abstract festival in the world" launches its new call for entries open to short·films exploring the creative possibilites of the dot and the line. No figuration, no perspective, just dots and lines as ends in themselves! An amazing challenge to study and reflect upon the essence of form and movement. Can you take it?
No entry fee and the deadline is Monday August 17th, 2009."

Check out the website for more information and online entry form:
http://www.puntoyrayafestival.com/english/index_eng.html
Online entry form
post here: http://visualmusic.ning.com/profiles/blogs/madactions-and-the-iotacenter

Iota Center - YouTube Channel

http://www.youtube.com/user/iotacenter
"iota is a public benefit, non-profit arts organization founded in 1994 on the premise that this wide range of techniques and titles share common aesthetic goals which unite them into a single art of light and movement today generally known as "Visual Music."
"iota is dedicated to preserving, promoting and uniting the dynamic world of visual music through our various programs: research, publication, preservation, exhibition and distribution. Our programs together celebrate this art form from its earliest appearance through its current expression with the latest technologies."
For more information, please visit our website at www.iotacenter.org

Videos on the iotacenter channel at present (April 2009) are works from the filmartist Stephanie Maxwell.

"Stephanie Maxwell has been creating stunningly beautiful and original experimental animation for over twenty years. As a film artist who specializes in hand painting and engraving directly onto the surface of 35mm film stock, Maxwell employs a wide variety of materials and tools, including paints, markers, bleach, stencils, engraving tools, airbrush and many more experimental techniques."



Stephanie Maxwell, Animated Works (1984-2007) can be purchased from Iotacenter at:
http://www.iotacenter.org/kinetica/maxwell

Tate Modern - Expanded Cinema Symposia

Activating the Space of Reception

"Featuring lectures, discussions, performances, projections and installations, this major international conference presents a critical appraisal of an expanding field of film and video art from multi-screen, immersive, performance-based live-projections through to interactive, digital and virtual reality multi-media events."...

"Works identified as Expanded Cinema often open up questions surrounding the spectator's construction of time/space relations, activating the spaces of cinema and narrative as well as other contexts of media reception. In doing so it offers an alternative and challenging perspective on filmmaking, visual arts practices and the narratives of social space, everyday life and cultural communication"...

"The conference is part of an AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) funded project entitled Narrative Exploration in Expanded Cinema set up by the late Dr Jackie Hatfield. Conducted by Duncan White and David Curtis, the project - based at the British Artists Film and Video Study Collection at Central St Martins, College of Art & Design (University of the Arts London) in collaboration with Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee - seeks to explore the various histories of expanded cinema and their impact on the question of narrative, space and time in experimental film and art practices."...


During the three days, there will be opportunities to visit installations of three landmark British Expanded Cinema installations:
Steve Farrer, The Machine, 1978-88
Tamara Krikorian, Time Revealing Truth, 1983
Lis Rhodes, Light Music, 1975

See: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/symposia/18016.htm

Abstracts and Speakers Bibliographies at:
http://www.studycollection.org.uk/

Speaker of note: Cindy Keefer of Center for Visual Music

Cindy Keefer (Centre for Visual Music, USA)
Raumlichtkunst to Vortex: Early Expanded Cinema Experiments of Oskar Fischinger and Jordan Belson (1926-1959)

COMPOSER - Jim Aitchison - Visible Music

Visible Music

Composing visions of sound by UK composer Jim Aitchison.

"Jim Aitchison is a composer whose music derives from a range of sources, often from the world of the visual, re-imagining contemporary and past artworks as notations of sound. He makes music for chamber ensembles, orchestra and solo performers out of encounters with visual art and living artists, curators and galleries. The work is proposed both as a response to these encounters and as part of a wider engagement with fundamental musical and artistic issues."

His responses to art/paintings in a musical context are quite extraordinary. The scores resemble the visual - as in the screenshot when you come to his website initially, here a painting entitled Elegy for Terry Frost by John Hyland is scored in the most incredible manner. It is worth taking ones time to go through his website (my comment).

"Jim Aitchison is a composer and a Henry Moore Fellow at the Royal Academy of Music and Birkbeck College, University of London. He is recognised for a particular vision linking visual art with compositional practice. He composes what curator Paul Moorhouse describes as 'conversations between art-forms,' working directly with leading figures from the worlds of art and music."

See Biography
Website: http://www.jimaitchison.com/

Richard Baily

Richard Baily's incredible images and animations are in quicktime video format on the webstie Image Savant. The colours and forms that he has created are incredible. Richard provided animations for several hollywood films and sadly died in 2006.
Many of his images can be seen on the http://www.imagesavant.com/ website.

Link to page with video clips:
http://www.imagesavant.com/QT.html

The center for Visual Music provide an excellent memoriam to him and his work
http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Baily.htm

Say it with Pictures - ARTICLE

Article: Say it with Pictures by Dennis H. Miller for Electronic Musician

Sep 1, 2008

Really informative article by Dennis H. Miller on tools (several free) that can convert images to sound and one that converts sound to images.  Written by Miller for Electronic Musician.

See: http://emusician.com/software/say-with-pictures/index.html

Musical Expression to Constructivist Painting

A Tate Modern exhibition in London, is holding a Rodchenko and Popova music event

(Sat 9, May, 2009)

"Composers such as Dmitri Shostakovitch, Nikolai Roslavets and Arthur Lourie gave muscial expression to many of the themes" that the Russion painters Rodchenko and Popova explored in their paintings.

"Liubov Popova (1889-1924) and Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) were pivotal figures in the debates and discussions that defined Constructivism.   ...

"The Constructivists compared the artist to an engineer, arranging materials scientifically and objectively, and producing art works as rationally as any other manufactured object...

There was already a distinct strain of utopianism in the Russian avant-garde – a determination to reinvent art, as if from zero. Kasimir Malevich's abstract paintings freed art from what he called 'the dead weight of the real world'...

[The] Constructivists rejected all ideas of illusory representation. Rodchenko focused on faktura, the physical qualities of the painting: the use of different paints and different textures, and how these related to other elements such as the painting surface, or the choice of colour. His experiments led to the 'Black on Black' series, in which the elimination of colour focused attention on the texture of the painting's surface, and its interaction with light. In these works, Stepanova wrote, 'nothing but painting exists'....

Popova's Painterly Architectonics respond to some of Malevich's ideas, but push them further. Geometric shapes jostle together, overlapping,intersecting, their edges pressing beyond the frame. A dynamic sense of instability and movement is matched by her use of strong colour. As the title suggests, Popova was already looking beyond painting, into architecture and three-dimensional structures, yet cramming that expansive energy onto the flat surface of a painting."

Sources: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/rodchenkopopova/introduction.shtm

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/rodchenkopopova/roomguide/room1.shtm

Check out the writeup of the exhibition online - Rodchenko & Popova Defining Constructivism

Tate Modern 12, Feb - 17, May 2009, London

My YouTube Channel

Dancing with Mathematica

DANCING WITH MATHEMATICA - PART OF THE CAMBRIDGE SCIENCE FESTIVAL

Music, generated in Mathematica, by composer Katarina Miljkovic; chereograhy by Dawn Kramer; video projections by Stephen Buck; performance by Dawn Kramer and Brian McCook.

Event at Cambridge Science Festival - Boston US

Dancing with Mathematica - The Broad Institute, 7 Cambridge Center - 26th April 2009

Dancing with Mathematica is a journey through complexity in movement, bady projection and sound. Music and choreography are structured on four classes of complexity, proposed by Stephen Wolfram A New Kind of Science.

While music develops by evolution of cellular automata, from simple to universally complex, choreography reflects on the nature of choice, questions the concept of self as a dolid, separate reality and looks at the body in relation to self, gener, transgender and aging.

The program is live performance of two pieces including movement, electronic sound and video. Music, generated in Mathematica, by composer Katarina Miljkovic; chereograhy by Dawn Kramer; video projections by Stephen Buck; performance by Dawn Kramer and Brian McCook.

See also:
http://katarina-miljkovic.net/
http://mysite.verizon.net/jsbuck1/DJK/

Visual Music Marathon - New York - Review

The MFA Computer Art Department at School of Visual Arts, the New York Digital Salon and the Department of Music and Multimedia Studies at Northeastern University presented the New York premiere of the Visual Music Marathon. The screenings of the 120 visual music works took place in the new Chelsea Visual Arts Theatre, recently acquired by the School of Visual Arts, New York. The theatre was an excellent venue for the screening of the works.   The schedule for the event and the program catalog can be downloaded from:

http://www.2009vmm.neu.edu/schedule.html

I was fortunate to have also attended the Boston premiere of the Visual Music Marathon held
in 2007, hence many of the wonderful works on show I had seen before and had become familiar with since.  After the first presentation of the event, I had some clear favourites, and these were still the case - such as Jean Detheux's wonderful works - Rupture, Liaisons, Daydream Mechanics V Sketch 3, Semiconductor's 200 Nanowebbers, Fran Hartnett's Navigating the Pearl System, Gordon Monro's Dissonant Particles, Larry Cuba's Calculated Movements, Dennis H. Miller's White Noise , Scott Drave's 165 Star Oasis.  After the viewing in New york other works came to my attention, the incredible lucsious works of Stephanie Maxwell - Time Streams and All that Remains and Bonnie Mitchel's 2BTextures. The skilfull composition of Barbara Neubauer's Passage, the rhythmic constructions of Brian Evans's Pipilo, the drama of Jeffers Egan's Bati Dominance.

To be fair, all the works were incredible in this marathon.  This is also a credit to the artistic director Dennis H. Miller, who curated the works that were shown.  The Visual Music Marathon program catalog is really worth exploring, if you wish to further investigate any of the artists whose works were shown at the event.  Download the program from the Visual Music Marathon North Eastern University homepage. Quick link here.

George Stadnik presented a really exciting installation of his lumia compositions on 3D tv and demonstrated an exciting presentation of the possibilities of lumia compositions in installation settings.  There were two live acts who presented their live audio-video performances in the Visual Arts Theatre - the incredibly tight minamilist work of Chiaki Watanabe with David Galbraith music.  The incredibly colourful work of S2; SIMSTIM SQUARED with Marjan Moghaddam on images and Adam Caine on music.  Interestingly, the live acts drew a packed audiences into the theatre who many left before the incredible film of Jean Detheux.  What a pity.  Still, nice to see some young people there, taking an interest in Visual Music.