Jack Ox 

(*1948) is a NY artist who has been engaged in the visualization of music for over 20 years. She has an active international career in exhibition and lectures and has been on the editorial board of Leonardo Journal of Art and Science since 1987.

Jack Ox has studied beyond her graduate degree in visual arts at the University of California at San Diego and has done considerable research in both music theory (Manhattan School of Music in NYC) and phonetics (University of Cologne in Germany) in order to produce a large body of work which is a visual mapping and structured understanding of the quasi mathematical field of music. She has worked her way through musical history including Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, Gregorian Chant, and Debussy’s Nuages. During her six year stay in Germany she made an 800 square foot hand-painted and collaged visualization of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate, the 41 minute long sound poem which organizes nonsense phonemes from German into a 19th C. sonata form. While researching the Ursonate she came upon and caused to be published an original, completely unknown recording by Kurt Schwitters himself as a CD on WERGO, Mainz, Germany. Ox participated in Vom Klang der Bilder at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in 1985, made an Ursonate presentation at the Centre Georges Pompidou during the Kurt Schwitters retrospective in Paris in 1994, and exhibited the complete cycle of 12 paintings based on Anton Bruckner's Eighth Symphony in 1996 at die Neue Galerie der Stadt in Linz, Austria. She has shown parts of her Ursonate installation at SoundCulture'96 in San Francisco, and exhibited frequently in Cologne, New York, and Vienna. The Ursonate was also exhibited at the Podewil in Berlin. 

 

Ox has been on the editorial board of Leonardo Journal of Art and Science for over 10 years and is presently co-guest editor with Jacques Mandelbroijt of a special on-going section called Synesthesia and Intersense in order to help define and demonstrate this cutting edge area of discovery and creative production. In 1993 she was sponsored by Xerox Engineering Systems, Germany. Since receiving initial start up funds from Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria in 1998 she has been working on this VR CAVE project. Since 1999 she has been on the board of directors of ASCI (Art and Science Collaboration, Inc.).

 

Jack Ox has given papers on this project at Invencao: think the next millennium program, sponsored by the ISEA, Leonardo, CAiia-Star, and the Itau Cultural in Sao Paulo, Brazil, at the Alliance-Chautauqua99 at Boston University as part of a symposium broadcast on the grid of the National Computational Science Alliance, and at Cyberarts: A new Aesthetic symposium at the Center for Advanced Study, and the Beckman Institut for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Also in 1999 she and David Britton appeared as an Artist-Scientist Team at ART SCI99 by ASCI in New York City.

 

Source: Creativity and Cognition Studios at University of Technology Sydney

 

 

Jack Ox, female

Reading

Sons et Lumières (2004) – A History of Sound in the Art of the 20th Century (in French) by Marcella Lista and Sophie Duplaix published by the Centre Pompidou for the excellent Paris exhibition in September 2004 until January 2005.


Curated by the Pompidou’s Sophie Duplaix with the Louvre’s Marcella Lista, the show required a good three or four hours to absorb, with its bombardment of sensory and intellectual input, including painting, sound sculpture, sound/light automata, film and video, and room-size installations. (Frieze Magazine)

Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 (2005) traces the history of a revolutionary idea: that fine art should attain the abstract purity of music. Over the past one hundred years some of the most adventurous modern and contemporary artists have explored unorthodox means to invent a kinetic, non-representational art modeled upon pure instrumental music. (Amazon)

Computer Music Journal: Visual Music (2005) - The articles in this issue are all devoted to the topic of Visual Music: audiovisual creations in which the artist strives to endow the video component with formal and abstract qualities that mimic those of musical composition. (Computer Music Journal)

Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses (2002) by Richard E. Cytowic disposes of earlier criticisms that the phenomenon cannot be real, demonstrating that it is indeed brain-based. Following a historical introduction, Cytowic lays out the phenomenology of synesthesia in detail and gives criteria for clinical diagnosis and an objective test of genuineness. (MIT Press)

 

SEE ALSO

Bärbel Neubauer (*1959) was born in Austria, studied film and stage design in Vienna at the Academy of Arts, diploma in 1983. She has been making about 30 animation films and experimental films since 1980 and composing music and filmmusic since 1991. (independent exposure)

FLOAT (2011) by Susi Sie is a short film, that tells the story of our lives in an abstract and philosophical manner; birth and death, desire and fear, unique moments and the eternal cycle of things. All of its scenes were filmed with a Canon 5D Mark II, 100mm macro, and have been edited with no additional computer animation and effects.

The musical score, entitled Component 1, was composed by Thomas Schüssler, who sees himself not only as a musician, but also as a scientist and developer of advertising. (Susi Sie)

Black (2010) by Susi Sie is focused on fear of the uncontrollable and its close relationship to fascination with the unfamiliar. All of its scenes were filmed with a Canon 5D Mark II, 100mm macro, and have been edited with no additional computer animation and effects. The original score for this short was created by Clemens Haas (1968, Germany), who studied Audio and Video Engineering as well as classical piano in Düsseldorf. (Susi Sie)

Susi Sie (1982) is a visual artist based in Cologne, Germany. She studied video art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Maastricht (2002-2006), then spent several years at a creative agency in Cologne, working in audio-visual media and realizes her own interdisciplinary art projects. Since 2011, she works as a freelance editor and cinematographer. (Susi Sie)

Vibeke Sorensen is an artist and professor working in digital multimedia and animation, interactive architectural installation, and networked visual-music performance. Her work in experimental new media spans more than three decades, and has been published and exhibited worldwide, including in books, galleries, museums, conferences, performances, film festivals, on cable and broadcast television, and the internet. (Vibeke Sorensen)