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Gumbasia 

(1955) 

by Art Clokey consists of animated clay shapes contorting to a jazz score. The title Gumbasia is an homage to Walt Disney's Fantasia.

Art Clokey created Gumbasia while studying at the University of Southern California under the direction of Slavko Vorkapić. It was a surreal short of pulsating lumps of clay set to music in a parody of Walt Disney's Fantasia. Gumbasia was created in a style Vorkapich taught called Kinesthetic Film Principles. Described as "massaging of the eye cells" this technique, based on camera movements and stop-motion editing, is responsible for much of the look and feel later seen in Gumby films. When Clokey showed Gumbasia to movie producer Sam Engel in 1955, Engle decided to fund a 15-minute short film that became the first Gumby episode – Gumby Goes to the Moon.

 

Source: Wikipedia

 

 

Gumbasia, jazz, stripes, kugeln, clay, Film

Reading

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)

Optical Poetry (2004) by Dr. William Moritz is the long-awaited, definitive biography of Oskar Fischinger. The result of over 30 years of research on this visionary abstract filmmaker and painter. In addition to Moritz's comprehensive biography, it includes numerous photographs in colour and black and white (many never before published), statements by Oskar Fischinger about his films, a newly created extensive filmography, and a selected bibliography. (John Libbey Publishing)

Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 (2005) traces the history of a revolutionary idea: that fine art should attain the abstract purity of music. Over the past one hundred years some of the most adventurous modern and contemporary artists have explored unorthodox means to invent a kinetic, non-representational art modeled upon pure instrumental music. (Amazon)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

Michael Fakesch: Don't stop (2007) by Tina Frank was created as part of Michael Fakesch's (ex Funkstörung) project Vidos, a video anthology inspired by his latest album Dos. Don't stop shows non-stop rotations and movements, a simple translation of the title. While the music's speed changes from slow to fast like chewing gum so does the image. (Tina Frank)

Kandinsky (2009) edited by Tracey Bashkof is the first full-scale retrospective of the artist's career to be exhibited in the United States since 1985, when the Guggenheim culminated its trio of groundbreaking exhibitions of the artist's life and work in Munich, Russia, and Paris. This presentation of nearly 100 paintings brings together works from the three institutions that have the greatest concentration of Kandinsky's work in the world, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; as well as significant loans from private and public holdings. (Guggenheim)

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)

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)

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)