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Visual Piano 

(2011) 

live performance by Kurt Laurenz Theinert in Ljubiljana, Slowenia. Music by Neža Naglič (keyboards).

Kurt Laurenz Theinert concentrates his work on visual experiences that do not refer to anything as images. He aims for the abstract reductive aesthetics, which, combined with his desire to dematerialise, ultimately brought him from photography to light.
Neža Naglič (keyboards) is a young Slovene improvisational musician. She is interested in exploring the sound capabilities of the piano that exceed its functionality and the tempered tuning. She reaches right into the heart of the instrument, sounding the strings and the body using various objects, including household objects and a janitor's tools.

 

Source: Kurt Laurenz Theinert

 

 

The visual piano is an instrument which makes it possible to create moving images in a space. It is unique and was conceived and developed by the photographer and light installation artist Kurt Laurenz Theinert in collaboration with the software designers Roland Blach and Philip Rahlenbeck.
Using a MIDI-keyboard it is possible to generate varying graphic patterns which can be digitally projected onto one or more screens. These dynamic and immediate drawings in light are not (as with VJ soft-and Hardware) generated by pre-recorded clips, but every moment of the performance is being played and modulated live and in real time via the keyboard and pedals.
Initially Theinert projected his drawings in light straight onto one screen; the expansion of the projection into 360° allows him to expand the visual experience of the audience into three dimensions. The intensified visual experience is astonishing: The defining edges of the darkened space are replaced by big, moving structures of light and the viewer gets immersed in a totally new cosmos of moving lines and fields of colour. The projection onto one screen was strongly reminiscent of constructivist painting and other modernist movements, the 360° projections generate architectural and technical associations. One is reminded of computer generated 3D simulations or laser beams. The symmetrical composition of the projection creates crystalline shapes that remind us of the design principles of Art-Deco or the utopian designs of expressionist architecture. At the same time the psychedelic colours quote the aesthetics of the Sixties.
Form and content are of one here. The visual piano performances explore professional contemporary artistic practice through the abstract, ephemeral medium of light, but at the same time they are consciously located in close proximity to the genre of serious entertainment.
(Winfried Stürzl)

Source: Kurt Laurenz Theinert


Visual Piano, real time, piano / organ, Live Visuals

Reading

Farbe-Licht-Musik – Synästhesie und Farblichtmusik (2005) by Jörg Jewanski and Natalia Sidler focuses on the research on the color-light-music of Alexander Lászlo who in 1925 achieved overwhelming success with his multimedia show. A short time after his new art form fell into oblivion. The autors of this work revived and developed the experiments of Lászlo: his music has been rediscovered and coupled with actual visuals. (Natalia Sidler)

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)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (2007) by pioneering digital artist Mark Amerika mixes (and remixes) personal memoir, net art theory, fictional narrative, satirical reportage, scholarly history, and network-infused language art. META/DATA is a playful, improvisatory, multitrack digital sampling of Amerika's writing from 1993 to 2005 that tells the early history of a net art world gone wild while simultaneously constructing a parallel poetics of net art that complements Amerika's own artistic practice. (The MIT Press)

Versum: Go (2010) is created in a realtime three-dimensional audiovisual composition tool programmed by Tarik Barri. It forces both the audience and the composer to look at the music and listen to the visuals. (Tarik Barri)

PMP is an audio-visual collective based in Singapore that focuses on the synaesthetic experience where sound and visuals interact in real time, steering away from the notion that audio and visuals are often the by-products of one another. Started in 2009 by Ivan, Felix and Bin, PMP’s music takes the form of minimal electronic music that fuses microsound, glitches and the sound of acoustic instruments. Visually, it is highly distinctive with generative visuals that reacts or controlled in real time. (PMP)

Messa di Voce (2003) by Golan Levin, Zachary Lieberman, Jaap Blonk, and Joan La Barbara augments the speech, shouts and songs produced by a pair of vocalists with real-time interactive visualizations. The project touches on themes of abstract communication, synaesthetic relationships, cartoon language, and writing and scoring systems, within the context of a sophisticated, playful, and virtuosic audiovisual narrative. Custom software transforms every vocal nuance into correspondingly complex, subtly differentiated and highly expressive graphics. Messa di Voce lies at an intersection of human and technological performance extremes, melding the unpredictable spontaneity and extended vocal techniques of human improvisers with the latest in computer vision and speech analysis technologies. (Golan Levin)

complex composition (2010) by Itaru Yasuda is a generative audiovisual concert piece updated every presentation. All sound and graphics are generated in real time by SuperCollider. (SuperCollider Symposium 2010)