Visual Music Archive

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Audio.Visual 

(2009) 

- On Visual Music and Related Media by Cornelia Lund and Holger Lund (Eds.). Apart from being a guide in the historical sense, this new volume provides theoretical approaches to understanding and making visual music.

Audio.Visual, 1st generation, 2nd generation, multi projection

As a publication, Audio.Visual - On Visual Music and Related Media is divided into two sections: the first deals with the academic discussion on the subject of visual music; the second introduces contemporary paradigms of audio-visual praxis in brief presentations and contextualises them. Apart from being a guide in the historical sense, this new volume provides theoretical approaches to understanding and making visual music. The subject is approached from the fringe (music video, Expanded Cinema, games, etc.) so that the phenomenon can, on the one hand, be more accurately defined via interfaces with other forms of audio-visual production and, on the other, through an attempt at distinguishing it from them. Drawing heavily on examples, the individual essays discuss various aspects of Visual Music.

 

Contemporary approaches to producing and handling visual music are presented in brief essays that abound with examples. The texts and illustrations are intended to introduce visual music from a great many angles, including the perspectives of musicians, artists, curators, festival directors and software developers, and provide insights into what is currently going on both in the experimental sector and at clubs.

 

The approaches and results presented in the book can be verified and checked with the accompanying DVD that features earlier and current examples of visual music. The DVD shows mainly material from live performances that is often extremely hard to find, be it from Expanded Cinema or performances by VJs and musicians. Visual Music and the interplay of cutting-edge media. An exciting book on what is going on right now in the new media: from the experimental sector to the club scene.

 

Source: Fluctuating Images

 

 

ISBN-10: 3897902931

ISBN-13: 978-3897902930

 

 

Audio.Visual, 1st generation, 2nd generation, multi projectionAudio.Visual, 1st generation, 2nd generation, multi projection

Reading

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)

‘vE-”jA: Art + Technology of Live Audio-Video (2006) by Xarene Eskander is a global snapshot of an exploding genre of tech-art performance: VJing and live audio-video. The book covers 40 international artists with 400+ colour images and 50+ movies and clips on an accompanying DVD and web downloads. (VJ Book)

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)

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SEE ALSO

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)

Paul Sharits (1943-1993) is widely known for his structural films, the use of multiple projectors, infinite film loops, experimental soundtracks, and interventions at the level of the filmstrip in order to realize his elemental mode of cinematic presentation. Trained initially as a painter, and a prolific theoretical writer, Paul Sharits' art-making was in fact wide-ranging, evidenced by his early involvement with Fluxus artists in New York. His many works on paper — from diagrams to abstract film scores, fashion drawings, and hallucinogenic illustrations — have yet to be fully integrated into his better-known body of work. (paulsharits.com)

Malcolm Le Grice (1940) is probably the most influential modernist filmmaker in British cinema. Malcolm LeGrice's work has explored the complex relationships between the filmmaking, projecting and viewing processes which constitute cinema as a medium, and shows an intense interest in the processes enabled by optical printers and by the combination of different types and gauges of film stock. (Screenonline)

The Drowning (2009) by Kasumi explores the impressions running through a man’s mind in the moments before his death: the sensation of time slowing down, of heightened bodily perceptions, and the simultaneous unreeling of an internal cinema of images. (Kasumi)

Telefante is formed by Luis Negrón van Grieken and Juan Carlos Orozco Velásquez. They put all kinds of media, new, old, forgotten, obsolete, overused, commercial, useless, all over the table, as if we were making a transversal cut through history. Simply it is about tell stories (new and old) through several media (new and old), with the aim to forget this unproductive dialectic and be able to capture the most difficult: the present. (Telefante)