Chronomops 

(2005) 

by Tina Frank and accompanied by music from General Magic opens up a shimmering, colorful space that is simultaneously an excess of color, frenzy of perception, and pop carousel.

The doors of perception, electronic style.

Tina Frank's Chronomops opens doors to truly different dimensions: different than digital art's reductionist studies so common today, different than the serially laid out minimalist images, and different than the omnipresent filtering and layering experiments.

Chronomops opens up a shimmering, colorful space that is simultaneously an excess of color, frenzy of perception, and pop carousel. An abstract architecture of vertical color bars is set in endless rotation, whereby the modules and building blocks fly around themselves—and the entire system likewise rotates. The forced movement forms a digital maelstrom whose suction pulls the observer deep into it.

A system surfacing as though out of a void, steadily plunging through its own dynamic into new excesses of mobility, while adventurously hopping axes, temporarily dissolving into two-dimensional stripes, then lapsing again into a prismatic staccato of light and color, tending towards a 90 degree angle, sideward— leaving an extreme dizzying feeling in its wake. Chronomops, accompanied by music from General Magic, which is also composed as a slip stream, thus shows what the pop psychedelics always knew to be true: that the "other" side looms right around the corner of the perfect groove, a labyrinth of colors and forms set in irregular motion, which merely has to be raised from its invisibility and liberated from its incomprehensible state. Electronic music’s inner life has seldom appeared so colorful and captivating.

(Christian Höller, translation by Lisa Rosenblatt)

 

Source: Tina Frank's website

 

 

Chronomops, stripes, Video Clip

Reading

Rewind, Play, Fast Forward (2010) – The Past, Present and Future of the Music Video by Henry Keazor, Thorsten Wübbena (eds.) brings together different disciplines as well as journalists, museum curators and gallery owners in order to take a discussion of the past and present of the music video as an opportunity to reflect upon suited methodological approaches to this genre and to allow a glimpse into its future. (transcript Verlag)

Audio.Visual - On Visual Music and Related Media (2009) by Cornelia Lund and Holger Lund (Eds.) 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. (Fluctuating Images)

 

SEE ALSO

Spectral Strands/ Saariaho: Vent nocturne (2010) by Garth Knox performing viola (at times with electronic treatments) and Brian O'Reilly manipulating real time visualizations. The moving images use source materials based on extreme close up footage Brian O'Reilly shot of Garth performing on the viola, then processed using Tom Demeyer's ImX software, with further editing and transformations using FCP to create the fixed form presented here. The music Vent nocturne for viola and electronics was composed by Kaija Saariaho for the project and is dedicated to Garth. (Brian O'Reilly on Vimeo)

The Moderat Show (2009) is an audiovisual project of Modeselektor, Apparat and Pfadfinderei. Based on the Moderat Album (CD & DVD), the show is a live adaption of the music and the video tracks. (Pfadfinderei on Vimeo)

Steve Reich: Second Movement (2006) - D-Fuse, in collaboration with director and designer César Pesquera performed with the London Symphony Orchestra for Steve Reich's 70th Birthday concert at the Barbican Hall featuring live video mixed to Reich's The Desert Music. (D-Fuse, PDF)

Synchromie (1971) by Norman McLaren features synchronization of image and sound in the truest sense of the word. To make this film, Norman McLaren employed novel optical techniques to compose the piano rhythms of the sound track, which he then moved, in multicolor, onto the picture area of the screen so that, in effect, you see what you hear. (National Filmboard of Canada)

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)