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Amon Tobin: ISAM 

(2011) 

live visuals by visual design company Leviathan in Chicago, Los Angeles-based V Squared Labs and SF-based fine art-techies Blasthaus.

On ISAM, his eighth and latest album (released today via indie British label Ninja Tune), he's evolved once again. This time he's built a virtual orchestra of out digitally rendered instruments, nearly all of them more or less synthesized from found objects. "I'm trying to make sounds that don't exist in the real world, using things in the real world," Amon Tobin says. "On this album, the sound isn't what it seems. There's no real guitar, real drum, or real voice. They've all been built to sound like instruments--but I can get them to do impossible things." (…)

This summer, Tobin will also introduce something spectacular into ISAM: actual spectacle, in the form of an eye-popping interpretation of his work. "I didn't want to be the guy onstage hunched over my laptop," Tobin says. Enter director Vello Virkhaus, cofounder of the Los Angeles-based V Squared Labs, the high-tech visual arts and F/X company behind the lavish stage designs for 50 Cent, the Police, and Coldplay. For ISAM, "Amon had this idea of making it a space journey," Virkhaus says. "So we decided to build him this structure, where he would pilot it like a space craft, and project images onto the structure to create this illusion of take off, then explore a dynamic universe."

To do this, Virkhaus and his team, along with large-scale visual design company Leviathan in Chicago and SF-based fine art-techies Blasthaus, built a massive, 2.5-ton structure composed of dozens of white cubes and rectangles made of wood and steel. Two sides of each box face the audiences at 45 degrees so the images hit both sides for a richer 3-D effect.

In the center of the structure is Tobin's cockpit – a semi-transparent control room where he plays his laptop and tweaks a few visual components to lend a sense of spontaneity.

The structure, at first glance, looks like a giant game of Tetris. But with the images, which were rendered, mapped, and calibrated by Virhaus and his team using custom-built 3-D modeling software, LED mapping programs and videogame animation techniques, the piece transforms into a shape-shifting, all-enveloping experience with glowing stars, orange volcanos, and a blasting rocket ship. The final result is like an exhibit you'd expect to find in the netherworld between MOMA and ILM.
("The Dr. Moreau Of Music" by Nancy Miller, published May 24, 2011)

 

Source: Fast Company

 

 

Amon Tobin: ISAM, vierecke, architecture, pop, 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)

VJ: Audio-Visual Art + VJ Culture (2006) edited by D-Fuse. A major change has taken place at dance clubs worldwide: the advent of the VJ. Once the term denoted the presenter who introduced music videos on MTV, but now it defines an artist who creates and mixes video, live and in sync to music, whether at dance clubs and raves or art galleries and festivals. This book is an in-depth look at the artists at the forefront of this dynamic audio-visual experience. (Laurence King Publishing)

VJam Theory: Collective Writings on Realtime Visual Performance (2008) presents the major concerns of practitioners and theorists of realtime media under the categories of performance, performer and interactors, audiences and participators. The volume is experimental in its attempt to produce a collective theoretical text with a focus on a new criticality based on practitioner/ artist theory in which artist/ practitioners utilise theoretical models to debate their practices. (VJ Theory)

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SEE ALSO

D-Fuse are a collective of London based artists who explore a wide range of creative media. Their explorations of live audiovisual performance, mobile media, web print, art and architecture, TV and film, have beend shown internationally. (D-Fuse)

Michal Levy was born and raised in Israel and graduated from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, in 2001. She currently resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where she work as an art director. Since childhood, music, dance and painting have been an important part of her life and she has contributed to her passion for exploring the visualization of sound. (Michal Levy)

Rhythm 21 (1921) - original title: Rhythmus 21. An early, abstract animation by Hans Richter composed solely of squares and rectangles that change shape. This another attempt by the artist to apply musical principles to screen images. (Glenn Erickson)

Trioon I (2003) by Karl Kliem. Music by Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Both elements of the music, an analog piano and a digital sinus wave, are represented by two overlapping visual elements: the fading sound of the piano by three abstracted octaves of a keyboard with the keys fading out just as softly as the tones fade from hearing. (Dienststelle)

Lichtfront is an design collective based in Cologne, Germany. They have a singular pursuit, and that is to interpret sounds directly through images. This no-bars approach makes it possible to perform live sets and for the VJs to directly react to the rhythm and the feel of the music. The form of the sets corresponds to the handwriting style of each Lichtfront VJ. Therefore there's the incentive, as the set itself demonstrates, to produce for each night a unforgetable visual clip. (bitfilm)