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White Noise 

(2010) 

is a ballett work by Amy Seiwert (choreography) and her company im'ij-re (that's how you pronounce the word imagery). Interactive system design by Frieder Weiss.

im'ij-re is a contemporary ballet company in San Francisco directed by Amy Seiwert. Holding the belief that ballet has an expressive and vital voice relevant for our current time, respect is held for swans and sylphs, but they are not where the company’s interests lie. Having no desire to regurgitate art,  im'ij-re’s artists share the belief that through collaboration and experimentation with artists of other discplines, vibrant and courageous ideas can be expressed. Habitual reactions are discouraged.

 

Source: Frieder Weiss

 

 

The final performance of the 2010 Festival is a landmark collaborative project between im'ij-re artistic director, choreographer Amy Seiwert and Frieder Weiss of Nuremburg the author of EyeCon and Kalypso, video motion sensing programs especially designed for use with dance, music and computer art. White Noise focuses on the human urge to polarize versus unify. The phrase, "I'm right, you're wrong" paints a black and white worldview caught in duality, where ideas are clung to and value systems point out differences rather than connections. Just as all sound can be canceled out with the presence of white noise, a question will arise as to whether the serene state is transcendent or dismissive.

 

Source: dance-tech.net

 

 

Stav Ziv: Can you tell me a bit more about your company im'ij-re and the collaborative and experimental work you do in that context, and how it might differ from something you would create with Smuin or another ballet company?

Amy Seiwert: im'ij-re is a great experiment. Its primary goal is to collaborate with artists of different disciplines. For example, last year, we collaborated with Frieder Weiss on White Noise. Frieder is a software engineer, and he creates interactive systems. We worked between a camera, lit the site with infrared and projected back onto the dance what the camera had caught, utilizing whatever systems he had written for that moment in music and choreography. The whole thing was time-coded. This is something that a lot of traditional ballet companies would not be interested in. The collaborations are about broaching artistic boundaries and bridging communities. Why can’t ballet be with a spoken word artist or a software engineer? It doesn’t always have to be to classical music with a tutu.

 

Source: Stanford Arts Review

 

 

White Noise, Scan, dance, 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)

See this Sound (2009) by Liz Kotz (Author), Cosima Rainer (Editor), Stella Rollig (Editor), Dieter Daniels (Editor), Manuela Ammer (Editor) compiles a huge number of artists, filmmakers, composers and performers, reaching back into the early twentieth century and into the present to survey overlaps between not only sound and art, sound and film, and the metaphor of cinema as rhythm or symphony. Proceeding chronologically, the book takes the early cinematic eye music of Hans Richter as a starting point, noting parallel works by Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger; moving into the postwar period, the art/cinema/ music experiments of Peter Kubelka, Valie Export and Michael Snow are discussed, establishing precedents to similar work by Rodney Graham, Carsten Nicolai, Jeremy Deller and many others. (Artbook)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

Scan Processor Studies are a collection of works by Woody Vasulka and Brian O'Reilly. The full work is of total approximate duration of 45 minutes, with sections of various lengths, textures, and dynamic qualities. The source materials were generated by Woody Vasulka using a Rutt-Etra Scan Processor in the 1970's and sat on a shelf for years, having been recently digitized. Scan Processor Studies was first exhibited as an installation in the ZKM's MindFrames exhibition. (Brian O'Reilly on Vimeo)

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)

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, Mois Multi Festival, Quebec City, Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz, Musica Genera Festival, Warsaw and the Yokohama Triennale. (Robin Fox)

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)

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)