Visual Music: Sensory Cinema 1920s-1970s

Visual Music: Sensory Cinema 1920s-1970s
Northwest Film Forum and The Sprocket Society, in association with Center For Visual Music, present this special series celebrating the history of Visual Music, at Northwest Film Forum, Seattle, April 9 - 13, 2010.

Over the past century, there have been a number of prescient artists who’ve approached cinema as a tool for merging visual art and music in order to create a new art form and explore uncharted areas of synaesthetic experience. Through a vibrant history of cinematic experiments, these pioneers have been inventing the concepts, aesthetics, techniques and technologies on which our modern image-and-sound culture is based.

VISUAL MUSIC is a rare opportunity to see restored film prints of work by such master animators as Oskar Fischinger, Mary Ellen Bute, Jordan Belson, Robert Breer and many others on the big screen. In addition, we’ll host a panel discussion on Seattle’s own history of visual music in the 1960s and early ’70s.

Center for Visual Music provides three programs:

April 9 - Optical Poetry: Oskar Fischinger Retrospective

April 10 - Seeing Sound: The Films of Mary Ellen Bute (in association with Cecile Starr), and

April 11 - Jordan Belson, Films Sacred and Profane

The series also features two programs curated by NWFF: Seattle Psychedelics and Sixties Synaesthetics

CVM's Director Cindy Keefer will introduce several programs and discuss the visual music of Fischinger, Bute and Belson.

Series curator: Peter Lucas. This program is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment For The Arts.

Series Website:
http://sensorycinema.org/

http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/


Amazon related products to purchase online.


Useful links
Still from Oskar Fischinger's Kreise (Circles) (1933), 35mm, color, sound (c) Fischinger Trust, courtesy Center for Visual Music. Link

biot(h)ing - Invisibles - Alisa Andrasek

I have just come across this most interesting installation research project to be shortly exhibited in paris. There is a lot of imagery that uses software generative processes to create "scripted" imagery - these images are always incredibly beautiful, and ordered displaying the most wonderful 'ordered' patterns that would be very hard to realise/create by hand processes. When these patterns are tied up to audio processes, then the most incredible synergy seems to take place. This project is a very physical realisation of both scripted animation and an interactive sonar field. What caught my eye was the imagery and the tight connection with sound. (Author comment)

"biot(h)ing - Invisibles is an interactive installation exhibited at the Prague Biennale and is to be exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2009. ‘Invisibles' by biot(h)ing uses holosonic speakers to create sound patterns projected into an interactive space. These speakers isolate individual cones of sound, creating a counterintuitive experience for the visitors as they move through different vibrations of sonar projections. At the same time LCD Screens display streams of information as it crystallizes and becomes visible through pulses of dynamic morphologies of 3D Cells scripted in animation software. These crystallized streams may also be affected by the physical environment through an interactive sonar field. At the core of this audio/visual/physical interface is an interactie sound programming environment that alters conventional forms of musical composition through the incorporation of algorithmically based processes. The user navigates the software's internal intelligence less like a composer and more like a programmer, adjusting various parameters to indirectly influence the system's internal network dynamics. The granular synthesis of sound results form the generation of thousands of short sonic grains which are combined linearly to form large-scale audio events."



"biothing is a research-design laboratory whose structure derives from particular linkages between various disciplinary and technological nodes, promoting intra-specific creative relationships which in turn serve as a transformative tissue for the design process itself..."
http://www.biothing.org/flash.htm

More info on biothing at:

http://www.biothing.org/wiki/doku.php?id=biothing

biothing has published work see wiki link below


http://www.biothing.org/wiki/doku.php

See also:

http://scriptedbypurpose.wordpress.com/participants/biothing/

This work is incredible - stunning.  Definitely worth adding a link to the photos on flickr

Flicker photos at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30976595@N00/