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Advanced Beauty 

(2007) 

was curated by Universal Everything and musician Simon Pyke. Advanced Beauty is an international collaboration and ongoing exploration of digital artworks born and influenced by sound.

Advanced Beauty is an ongoing exploration of digital artworks born and influenced by sound, an ever-growing collaboration between programmers, artists, musicians, animators and architects.

 

The first collection is a series of audio-reactive video sound sculptures. Inspired by synasthesia, the rare, sensory experience of seeing sound or tasting colours, these videos are physical manifestations of sound, sculpted by volume, pitch or structure of the soundtrack.

 

The films embrace unusual video making processes, the visual programming language Processing, high-end audio analysis and fluid dynamic simulations alongside intuitive responses in traditional cell animation. Each artist was given the same set of parameters to work within; to start, finish and exist within a white space, creating a seamless coherence, all sculptures sharing the same white environment.

 

Using the 1080p HD format, with 5:1 surround sound, the films transform the screen into a digital canvas, how the minimalism of a single, floating pixel can be as engaging as the maximalism of an intense multicoloured explosion.

 

Curated by Universal Everything and musician Simon Pyke, Advanced Beauty is an international collaboration, taking in a family of artists from London, Russia, New York, Japan, Buenos Aires, Glasgow to San Francisco.

 

Source: Universal Everything

 

 

Advanced Beauty, processing, Video Clip, Installation

Reading

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)

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)

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SEE ALSO

Perceptio (2011) by PMP is an audiovisual concert that investigates the state of our perception towards pollution and climate change in a local context. Perceptio combines cinematics and generative art/ animation with sound and music that is a whole, inseparable from one another. Collecting sound and visual samples from various parts of Singapore, these field recordings are then harmoniously combined with computer generated visuals and sounds to create an immersive experience. (PMP)

Itaru Yasuda (1984) is a Japanese audiovisual artist. Based in Tokyo. Focusing on computational audiovisual composition. Representative of a new generation of composers in this field, Itaru Yasuda takes algorithmic composition to levels of intricacy that years ago would have required a warehouse full of computer processing. These days, with the help of software like SuperCollider, audiovisual work can reach new levels of expression without the hindrance of hardware or technological boundaries. This might just be a sneak peak into the future. (Itaru Yasuda)

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)

Ali M. Demirel (*1972) studied Nuclear Engineering and Architecture. He started making experimental videos in 1993, focusing on minimal, eerie, hypnotic, and psychedelic images. Reflecting his background in physics and architecture, his videos are structural compositions with a conceptual base. (Phase 3)

CONTAKT (2008) was a series of interactive performance events to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Richie Hawtin's label Minus. Ali M. Demirel, Hawtin's visualist, produced the show's video and also interacted with the audience. (Kineme Interactive Media)