Visual Music Archive

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Ström 

(2008) 

by Mattias Petersson (music) and Fredrik Olofsson (video) is, in its full version, a 45-minute minimalistic piece for five loudspeakers, live-electronics and live-video, based on an open-minded, artistic approach towards electricity.

Ström by Mattias Petersson (music) and Fredrik Olofsson (video) is, in its full version, a 45-minute minimalistic piece for five loudspeakers, live-electronics and live-video, based on an open-minded, artistic approach towards electricity. The piece is an attempt to transfer electric currents via sound to the audience. The five speakers in the surround system struggles to take over the sonic stream like electro-magnets. Sine waves and noise rotates with breakneck speeds around the listeners, tries to charge them with static electricity and, as an ultimate goal, even make them levitate.

The video part is in direct connection with the sound and is generated out of five discrete lines – one for each channel in the surround system. The lines are treated in different ways, and as the high voltage builds up in the music they look more and more like electric wires, inflicting each other with violent discharges and eruptions.

 

DVD released on Fylkingen Records in 2008.

 

Source: Mattias Petersson

 

 

Ström, super collider, stripes, Video Clip, Code

Reading

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)

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

Chronomops (2005) by Tina Frank 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. (Tina Frank)

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)

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)

Ryoji Ikeda (*1966) is one of Japan's leading electronic composers and focuses on the minutiae of ultrasonics, frequencies and the essential characteristics of sound itself. His work exploits sound's physical property, its causality with human perception and mathematical dianoia as music, time and space. Using computer and digital technology to the utmost limit, Ryoji Ikeda has been developing particular microscopic methods for sound engineering and composition. (Ryoji Ikeda)

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)