Visual Music Archive

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grau 

(2004) 

is a personal reflection by Robert Seidel on memories coming up during a car accident, where past events emerge, fuse, erode and finally vanish ethereally. Various real sources where distorted, filtered and fitted into a sculptural structure.

Various real sources where distorted, filtered and fitted into a sculptural structure to create not a plain abstract, but a very private snapshot of a whole life within its last seconds. Music by Heiko Tippelt and Philipp Hirsch.

The living paintings (Tableaux Vivants) of growing structures branch out over 10:01 minutes (a reference to the binary system by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, where he ascribes 1 to god and 0 to the devil) without ever reaching pure black or white respectively. Every element originates from real experiences and is adapted from sketches, body fragments or scientific visualization methods. For example the first, still colored seconds are the prismatic halos of the collision fading into gray ("grau" in german)... The musical framework connects the memories born out of the dramatic moment to clusters. These are unleashed from the image flux partially - to ease the desired, free associations of the beholder...

 

Source: Australian electronic music, arts, media, project listings

 

 

_grau is a mesmerizing, beautiful and disturbing work of art that fuses dark and light to create organic forms and amorphous shapes. The scenes unfold slowly, elegantly revealing tensions between seemingly simple fragments of life. It feels like a long look at some primordial soup giving birth to some of the world's first life forms, or one-celled organisms that can't quite fully resolve themselves. The soundtrack, with its lonely drones rising and falling, make us believe we are witnessing a dark creation. The director's most impressive accomplishment was in going beyond the technology of the computer to create something that feels as if it is made of real moments in time, inside a reality only slightly offset from our own.

 

Source: SHIFT

 

 

grau, cars, berlin, Video Clip

Reading

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)

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)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

Fast & Furious: Web trailer (2009) by Addictive TV. Burning rubber, skids and squealing tyres galore - this movie was made for remixing...! Slamming the pedal-to-the-metal, Vin Diesel and Paul Walker re-team for the ultimate chapter of the movies built on speed. (Addictive TV's YouTube Channel)

Fredrik Olofsson is educated in music composition at the Royal Music Academy in Stockholm and at the Music College in Piteå. He writes software for interactive installations, fiddles with electronics and performs audiovisual pieces under the alias redFrik. (HfM Karlsruhe)

Collaborations include twelve years with the group MusicalFieldsForever, making interactive art for museums, exhibitions and public spaces. Fredrik Olofsson is also working as a researcher on the Rhyme project in Norway and teaches the computational art class at UdK in Berlin. (Digital in Berlin)

Sehsucht has its home the heart of Hamburg's Karolinenquarter – home of advertising agencies, creatives and artists. Founded in 2000 by a bunch of hungry design addicts, Sehsucht has come to leave its mark as a top-notch quality label in the field of animations and graphics. (Sehsucht)

Vogelstimmen (2009) by Victor Morales was performed alongside Olivier Messiaen's Un Sourire played by the TonKünstler Orchestra at the Festspielhaus in St Pölten, Austria. Victor Morales was not looking for a representation or marriage of media/meaning. He used CryEngine 2 to make the 3D space/map and performed it using Quartz Composer to control the montage in realtime and to add some effects. (Victor Morales)

Rhythm (1957) was intended as a publicity film for Chrysler, Len Lye used rapid editing to speed up the assembly of a car, and synchronized it to African drum music. Chrysler was horrified by the music and suspicious of the way a worker was shown winking at the camera. (centre for art tapes)