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Robin Fox 

is an artist straddling the often artificial divide between audible and visible arts. As an audio-visual performance artist his work has featured in festivals worldwide.

Recent appearances include a commissioned performance for the Henie Onstad Kunstcenter, Oslo (March 2010), Mois Multi Festival, Quebec City (Feb 2010), Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz (Nov 2009), Musica Genera Festival, Warsaw (June 2009) and the Yokohama Triennale (September 2008).
His audio visual films for the cathode ray oscilloscope are documented on the DVD release Backscatter (2004) with more recent works Volta and 5 Creation Myths being exhibited as video works at the RoslynOxley9 gallery in Sydney, The Asian Art Biennale in Taipei, the Miniartextil International exhibition in Como Italy and most recently at the Gesellschaft für Kunst und Gestaltung in Bonn as part of Geometric Form seen in Recent Sound.
His groundbreaking work with Chunky Move has contributed to the recent piece Mortal Engine winning a Helpmann award for Best Visual Production and an Honorary mention at the illustrious Prix Ars Electronica. He also scored the critically acclaimed work Connected with Oren Ambarchi and has produced two works, RGB and Drift, with groundbreaking new choreographer Antony Hamilton.
Other projects include a photography exhibition called Proof of Concept which showed at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne July 2010 and Interior Design, a research project with the Bionic Ear Institute composing music for cochlear implant wearers. He is currently working on a giant interactive Theremin for the City of Melbourne.
Musically he has released 3 albums with composer and performer Anthony Pateras (Editions Mego/Synaesthesia) and one with double bassist Clayton Thomas (Room 40). He has also performed with the likes of Oren Ambarchi, Lasse Marhaug, Jerome Noetinger, Stephen O’Malley and Erick D’Orion among numerous other encounters. His recent solo LP/Cassette on deMego, A Handful of Automation, is his first full length solo audio release. More recently, the Warsaw based label Bocian has released his first solo 7″ More Impossible Futures.
He also has a PhD in composition, from Monash University focusing on the development of multi-channel performance ecologies and the design of interactive electro-acoustic situations that explore the dynamic between performer, space and computer; and an MA in musicology, which documents the history of experimental music making in Melbourne 1975-9.

 

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You wouldn’t think it, but Melbourne based sound and visual artist Robin Fox somehow completely missed the rave period and its epic laser displays. He has made up for this however, by constantly developing jaw dropping high-powered, audio controlled laser systems that have traveled the world. (...)
Fox is the Laser and Sound Artist behind contemporary dance company Chunky Move’s Mortal Engine, a dance-video-laser performance spectacular, which uses movement-responsive video projections to portray an ever-shifting, shimmering world in which the limits of the human body are an illusion.

 

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Robin Fox, laser, dance

Reading

Digital Harmony (1980): On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art – John Whitney, Sr. wanted to create a dialog between "the voices of light and tone." All of his early experiments in film and the development of sound techniques lead toward this end. He felt that music was an integral part of the visual experience; the combination had a long history in man's primitive development and was part of the essence of life. His theories On the complementarity of Music and Visual Art were explained in his book, Digital Harmony, published by McGraw-Hill in 1980. (Paradise 2012)

The Art of Projectionism (2007) by Frederick Baker (in German) sets out the principles behind his use of projectors in the film making process. He defines a projectionist school of filmmaking and media art. In this publication he also presented Ambient film, a surround experience that can be shown in specially developed cinemas. (Wikipedia)

Expanded Cinema (1970) - In a brilliant and far-ranging study, Gene Youngblood traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. New technological extensions of the medium have become necessary. Thus he concentrates on the advanced image-making technologies of computer films, television experiments, laser movies, and multiple-projection environments. Outstanding works in each field are analyzed in detail. Methods of production are meticulously described, including interviews with artists and technologists. (John Coulthart)

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SEE ALSO

William Forsythe (*1949) is recognized as one of the world's foremost choreographers. His work is acknowledged for reorienting the practice of ballet from its identification with classical repertoire to a dynamic 21st-century art form. William Forsythe's deep interest in the fundamental principles of organisation has led him to produce a wide range of projects including installations, films, and web-based knowledge creation. (The Forsythe Company)

Kurt Laurenz Theinert (*1963), photographer and light artist, concentrates in his work on visual experiences that do not refer, as images, to anything. On the contrary, he is striving for an abstract, reductiv aesthetic that has ultimately led him – through a wish for more dematerialisation – from photography to light as a medium. With the aid of software developers Roland Blach and Philipp Rahlenbeck, he has also created an image instrument (Visual Piano) on a MIDI-keyboard basis, that allows him to translate his artistic intentions into live performances while configuring time with light. (Kurt Laurenz Theinert)

Klaus Obermaier (*1955) is a media-artist, director/ choreographer and composer based in Vienna. His innovative works in the area of performing arts, music, theatre and new media, are highly acclaimed by critics and audience. He worked with dancers of the Nederlands Dans Theater, Chris Haring, Robert Tannion (DV8), Desireé Kongerød (S.O.A.P. Dance Theatre Frankfurt). He composed for ensembles like Kronos Quartet, German Chamber Philharmonics, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Balanescu Quartet, among others. (Klaus Obermaier)

Christopher Salter (*1967) is a media artist, performance director and composer/ sound designer based in Montreal, Canada and Berlin, Germany. His artistic and research interests revolve around the development and production of real time, computationally-augmented responsive performance environments fusing space, sound, image, architectural material and sensor-based technologies. Chris Salter collaborated with Peter Sellars and William Forsythe and co-founded the collective Sponge, whose works stretched between artistic production, theoretical reflection and scientific research. Chris Salter’s performances, installations, research and publications have been presented at numerous festivals and conferences around the world. (TASML)

1 Room – 3 Aspects (2007) by Kurt Laurenz Theinert (projections), Alexandra Mahnke (dance) and Markus Birkle (guitar). They create and interpret a space with the tools of their respective arts, with light, movement and sound. The three aspects in this multilayered audiovisual collaboration originate from a space – here, it’s the gallery space. For the listeners/viewers, themselves integral part of that same space, a special audiovisual room for perception opens up, and the three different aspects become deeper layer by layer. (Fluctuating Images)