Visual Music Archive

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Strata #2 

(2009) 

by Quayola explores the icons of french gothic imagery and architecture, focusing on the layering of times function and representations. Music: Mira Calix and Autobam.

Strata #2 describes an imaginary alteration of architectural matter. By moving through the spaces of Notre Dame and Saint Eustache a process of metamorphosis is slowly revealed, transforming structure and function of the original churches. De-contextualizing religious stained-glass imagery, this piece plays with history and its image. It challenges the stratified historical meanings detained in the western society through time. Assuming different meanings, the represented stained-glass windows appear under a new perspective that focuses on their images rather than on their historical and architectural significance. In a dynamic dialogue between sound, image and architecture, Strata #2 gives life to a hybrid dimension where reality and artificiality coexist and interact harmoniously.

 

Source: Quayola's website

 

 

Strata #2, sacral, architecture, Video Clip

Reading

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)

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)

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)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

Robert Seidel (*1977) is an experimental filmmaker and projection artist based in Germany. He began studying biology, but went on to gain a media-design diploma from the Bauhaus University Weimar. His films have been shown in art museums as well as at more than 250 festivals (Prix Ars Electronica, onedotzero, Dotmov, etc.), and honoured with prizes such as an Honorary Award at the KunstFilmBiennale and the prize for Best Experimental Film at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. (IdN)

One Minute Soundsculpture (2009) by Daniel Franke (We Are Chopchop) scored by Ryoji Ikeda and filled with visual shenanigans that correspond to the soundtrack. (We Love You So)

Audio Kinematics (2007) is an audio/video installation by Jost Muxfeldt. Audio Kinematics works with the phenomenology of sound and space, and how a listener is manifest in that space. Formally, it plays with the idea of kinematic relations on the level of sound: a virtual audio sculpture. It utilizes the spatial relations and proportions of a mechanical structure to determine various parameters of a sound composition, and creates a kind of virtual kinetic sound sculpture. (Jost Muxfeldt)

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)

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)