Winterreise – Songs & Places 

(2010) 

is a collaboration between Victor Morales (visuals), Ulrike Sowodniok (voice and performance) and Hannes Strobl (Music). It is an exploration of Franz Schubert’s iconic song cycle.

Winterreise – Songs & Places is an exploration of Franz Schubert’s iconic song cycle where different spaces intersect in order to create a new and interesting performance. Real-time visuals generated with video games and surround music based on urban field recordings and Schubert’s Winterreise lyrical part were combined.

 

The originality of this piece comes not only from the mixture of these different mediums but also from the interpretation of the original Winterreise. Rather than focus on “a subtle journey to death” we decided to explore the ideas of intoxication, psychedelia and “the broken heart” situated on a landscape that is a “desert” generated from a picture of Schubert’s face. Sonically, our intention was to create spaces rather than reproducing the original piano score, so we can immerse the audience on a variety of psychological states. As a performance, there is only soprano on stage, who provides a voice and a body that tells a story without acting it.

 

Winterreise – Songs and Places is a collaboration between Victor Morales (visuals), Ulrike Sowodniok (voice and performance) and Hannes Strobl (Music). This piece premiered at the Festspielhaus St. Pölten in Austria on October 15, 2010.

 

Source: Winterreise – Songs & Places (blog)

 

 

Winterreise - Songs & Places is an acoustic-visual performance in which Schubert's classic is understood as a dialectical landscape. A virtual landscape is the antithesis of a surrounding landscape; a political landscape is the thesis that counteracts a romantic one. Electronic ice is attacked by the warmth of the human voice: a cold avatar discovers his circumstances and finds himself in a world that is constructed like a city, like a wood. A mountain that could consist of data, a memory that feels like fate, a red sun, a black tie, a runny nose, a violet ocean, a broken chair, the silence of snow, the smell of perfume/sweat. The singer, the actor, the musician, all can disappear on the horizon, observing the landscape and merging into it. Using video-game technology and music a virtual landscape is travelled through on stage, always in search of political/restless, surreal/mental and electronic/mechanical spaces.

 

Source: Hannes Strobl

 

 

Winterreise – Songs & Places, scifi, astronomy, berlin, real time, software, Games, Quartz composer, Live Visuals

Reading

Audiovisuology: See this sound (2010) - An Interdisciplinary Compendium of Audiovisual Culture. This all-embracing compendium brings together texts on various art forms in which the relationship between sound and image plays a significant role and the techniques used in linking the two. The entire spectrum of audiovisual art and phenomena is presented in 35 dictionary entries. (Cornerhouse)

Farbe-Licht-Musik – Synästhesie und Farblichtmusik (2005) by Jörg Jewanski and Natalia Sidler focuses on the research on the color-light-music of Alexander Lászlo who in 1925 achieved overwhelming success with his multimedia show. A short time after his new art form fell into oblivion. The autors of this work revived and developed the experiments of Lászlo: his music has been rediscovered and coupled with actual visuals. (Natalia Sidler)

See this Sound (2009) by Liz Kotz (Author), Cosima Rainer (Editor), Stella Rollig (Editor), Dieter Daniels (Editor), Manuela Ammer (Editor) compiles a huge number of artists, filmmakers, composers and performers, reaching back into the early twentieth century and into the present to survey overlaps between not only sound and art, sound and film, and the metaphor of cinema as rhythm or symphony. Proceeding chronologically, the book takes the early cinematic eye music of Hans Richter as a starting point, noting parallel works by Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger; moving into the postwar period, the art/cinema/ music experiments of Peter Kubelka, Valie Export and Michael Snow are discussed, establishing precedents to similar work by Rodney Graham, Carsten Nicolai, Jeremy Deller and many others. (Artbook)

 

SEE ALSO

Tarik Barri is an audiovisual composer based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Reflecting his interests in programming, drawing and composing into a coherent multimedial discipline, he developed and uses software that merges audio and visuals into a new audiovisual reality. (Sonic Acts Festival)

Construction 76 (2008) by video artist LIA was created in collaboration with the musicians collective @c. A five-minute sound track was taken from @c’s 55-minute track 76 and synchronized with visuals: parallel to a sound oscillating between bongo sounds, electronics, rich sonic associations and atmospheric piano/cello sounds, the computer-programmed video features arabesque-like shapes and simple graphic elements that arise against a cosmic, black and red background, multiply and vanish again. (Lia)

Aphex Swarm (2008) is a Visual Muisc clip by Reza Ali. The base video material was a flocking simulation in Maya. The audio track is Girl/ Boy Song (18£ Snare Rush Remix) by Aphex Twin. (Reza Ali)

formula (2000), a constantly evolving work updated with each presentation, is a perfect synchronization between Ryoji Ikeda's sound frequencies and the movements on the screen. It places the viewer in a binary geometry of space, and exploits the darkness to amplify the perceptions, with outstanding success. (Ryoji Ikeda)

Bob Sabiston (*1967) is an American film art director, computer programmer, and creator of the Rotoshop software program for computer animation. (Wikipedia)