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