Visual Music Archive

close Work Detail

 

Small Room Tango 

(2003-07) 

is an experiment in videomusical technique by Gabriel Shalom using nothing but the synchronous sounds and images captured in a piano practice room.

Intended merely as a proof of concept of some ideas I had back in the winter of 2003, this piece went on to be featured in the Best of Optronica, Best of Cologne OFF and numerous other short film and video festivals. It was finally published on DVD by Raum für Projektion in 2007 as part of Loop Pool On Ice, commissioned by the 53rd International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.

 

"Anyone who has attempted this kind of video-sampling-whilst-letting-the-audio-determine-the-structure will know just how extremely bloody difficult & fiddly it all is. Hats off big time, then, to Gabriel Shalom, who not only makes it look natural & easy but even squeezes poetry from it." (Michael Szpakowski, co-curator of the DVblog)

 

Source: Gabriel Shalom on Vimeo

 

 

Small Room Tango, jazz, editing, Video Art

Reading

Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film 1910-1975 (1979) is a catalogue of an exhibition held at the Hayward Gallery in London from 3 May until 17 June 1979 on rare, essential and controversial avant-garde film history.

Notation. Calculation and Form in the Arts (2008) is a comprehensive catalogue (in German) edited by Dieter Appelt, Hubertus von Amelunxen and Peter Weibel which accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the Academy of the Arts, Berlin and the ZKM | Karlsruhe. (ZKM)

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)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

Gravity (2009) by Montreal-based designer Renaud Hallée is made from falling objects synchronized to produce rhythm. (Visual Music/ Maura McDonnell )

Rewind, Play, Fast Forward (2010) – The Past, Present and Future of the Music Video by Henry Keazor, Thorsten Wübbena (eds.) brings together different disciplines as well as journalists, museum curators and gallery owners in order to take a discussion of the past and present of the music video as an opportunity to reflect upon suited methodological approaches to this genre and to allow a glimpse into its future. (transcript Verlag)

Arthur Lipsett (1936-1986) was a Canadian avant-garde director of short collage films. Arthur Lipsett's meticulous editing and combination of audio and visual montage was both groundbreaking and influential. (Wikipedia)

T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968) is short film by Paul Sharits dedicated to and starring poet David Franks, whose voice also appears on the soundtrack. Pure colour and a few still images alternate in a wide variety of permutations. The spectator thus experiences the film as a constant and often aggressive flickering, which varies rhythmically and operates at the limits of perception. The coloured fields flatten the screen surface and light tends to be felt concretely in the cinema space itself, with the screen boundary pulsating and shifting with after-images. (Tate Modern)

Scott Pagano creates moving image content utilizing shards of architecture, disfunction, and futurism. With influences ranging from minimal painting to cinema, his work offers a re-envisioned perspective on the graphic stratas that saturate our visual perception. His meticulously constructed abstract artworks push the boundaries of audio-visual composition and process using a dynamic mix of cinematographic and synthetic imagery. (Scott Pagano)