Visual Music Archive

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1 Room – 3 Aspects 

(2007) 

by Kurt Laurenz Theinert (projections), Alexandra Mahnke (dance) and Markus Birkle (guitar). They create and interpret a space with the tools of their respective arts, with light, movement and sound.

The three aspects in this multilayered audiovisual collaboration originate from a space – here, it’s the gallery space. For the listeners/viewers, themselves integral part of that same space, a special audiovisual room for perception opens up, and the three different aspects become deeper layer by layer.

The Visual Piano is a unique instrument, designed to create light graphics and moving images in space. It was developed and produced by light artist and photographer Kurt Laurenz Theinert, together with software programmers Roland Blach and Phillip Rahlenbeck. Theinert creates and projects these graphics live and in real time.

For Alexandra Mahnke, who holds a diploma in modern stage dance from the Folkwang-Hochschule in Essen, dance is communication in space, a three-dimensional art beyond the classic stage situation. Her communication is with other dancers, with the audience, or, at this event, with additional light elements that define the shape of both body and space.

The guitar improvisations of Markus Birkle are the third aspect. If you already know his virtuoso soundscapes, accompanying silent movies like Nosferatu, and maybe also his playing with Die Fantastischen Vier or Netzer, you won’t need any explanations. To anyone else: this is the perfect opportunity to witness the audiovisual skills of an exceptional musician.

 

Source: Fluctuating Images

 

 

1 Room – 3 Aspects, real time, piano / organ, dance, Live Visuals

Reading

The Art of Projectionism (2007) by Frederick Baker (in German) sets out the principles behind his use of projectors in the film making process. He defines a projectionist school of filmmaking and media art. In this publication he also presented Ambient film, a surround experience that can be shown in specially developed cinemas. (Wikipedia)

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)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

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)

ray vibration is a realtime audio-visual performance by Tina Tonagel, Christian Faubel and Ralf Schreiber. Three overhead projectors, three screens and three sound systems. Different electro-kinetic devices, machines and instruments are placed on the projectors. They produce movement and sound. The small sounds of what happens on the projectors are filtered, distorted and amplified. At the same time a triptych in cinemascope format displays magnified, filtered, distorted images of what happens on the screens/fresnel lenses of the projectors. (ray vibration)

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)

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)

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)