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White Noise 

(2010) 

is a ballett work by Amy Seiwert (choreography) and her company im'ij-re (that's how you pronounce the word imagery). Interactive system design by Frieder Weiss.

im'ij-re is a contemporary ballet company in San Francisco directed by Amy Seiwert. Holding the belief that ballet has an expressive and vital voice relevant for our current time, respect is held for swans and sylphs, but they are not where the company’s interests lie. Having no desire to regurgitate art,  im'ij-re’s artists share the belief that through collaboration and experimentation with artists of other discplines, vibrant and courageous ideas can be expressed. Habitual reactions are discouraged.

 

Source: Frieder Weiss

 

 

The final performance of the 2010 Festival is a landmark collaborative project between im'ij-re artistic director, choreographer Amy Seiwert and Frieder Weiss of Nuremburg the author of EyeCon and Kalypso, video motion sensing programs especially designed for use with dance, music and computer art. White Noise focuses on the human urge to polarize versus unify. The phrase, "I'm right, you're wrong" paints a black and white worldview caught in duality, where ideas are clung to and value systems point out differences rather than connections. Just as all sound can be canceled out with the presence of white noise, a question will arise as to whether the serene state is transcendent or dismissive.

 

Source: dance-tech.net

 

 

Stav Ziv: Can you tell me a bit more about your company im'ij-re and the collaborative and experimental work you do in that context, and how it might differ from something you would create with Smuin or another ballet company?

Amy Seiwert: im'ij-re is a great experiment. Its primary goal is to collaborate with artists of different disciplines. For example, last year, we collaborated with Frieder Weiss on White Noise. Frieder is a software engineer, and he creates interactive systems. We worked between a camera, lit the site with infrared and projected back onto the dance what the camera had caught, utilizing whatever systems he had written for that moment in music and choreography. The whole thing was time-coded. This is something that a lot of traditional ballet companies would not be interested in. The collaborations are about broaching artistic boundaries and bridging communities. Why can’t ballet be with a spoken word artist or a software engineer? It doesn’t always have to be to classical music with a tutu.

 

Source: Stanford Arts Review

 

 

White Noise, Scan, dance, Live Visuals

Reading

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)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

the concept of … (here and now) (2010) by Klaus Obermaier consists of seven chapters that reflect and investigate multiple simultaneous perspectives and the resulting ambiguity. The transmission of body-time into computer-time and its retransfer into the physical space as visual and acoustic components of the digital environment, as well as the superimposition of different variable structures and timings, all this unveils the tension between reality and representation, between live performance and its digital depiction and transformation. And since all content is created in real-time by the performers, it shows us the fascination but also the limitations of our existence in the inescapable here and now. (Klaus Obermaier)

Scan Processor Studies are a collection of works by Woody Vasulka and Brian O'Reilly. The full work is of total approximate duration of 45 minutes, with sections of various lengths, textures, and dynamic qualities. The source materials were generated by Woody Vasulka using a Rutt-Etra Scan Processor in the 1970's and sat on a shelf for years, having been recently digitized. Scan Processor Studies was first exhibited as an installation in the ZKM's MindFrames exhibition. (Brian O'Reilly on Vimeo)

Christopher Salter (*1967) is a media artist, performance director and composer/ sound designer based in Montreal, Canada and Berlin, Germany. His artistic and research interests revolve around the development and production of real time, computationally-augmented responsive performance environments fusing space, sound, image, architectural material and sensor-based technologies. Chris Salter collaborated with Peter Sellars and William Forsythe and co-founded the collective Sponge, whose works stretched between artistic production, theoretical reflection and scientific research. Chris Salter’s performances, installations, research and publications have been presented at numerous festivals and conferences around the world. (TASML)

William Forsythe (*1949) is recognized as one of the world's foremost choreographers. His work is acknowledged for reorienting the practice of ballet from its identification with classical repertoire to a dynamic 21st-century art form. William Forsythe's deep interest in the fundamental principles of organisation has led him to produce a wide range of projects including installations, films, and web-based knowledge creation. (The Forsythe Company)

Igor Stravinsky: Le Sacre du Printemps (2006) is an interactive stereoscopic project by Klaus Obermaier and Ars Electronica Futurelab, featuring Julia Mach. Premiered by the Bruckner Orchestra Linz, Dennis Russell Davies. In conventional productions of Le Sacre one choreographs and dances to the music. In this case, though, the dynamics and structure of the music interactively transform the virtual presence of the dancer and her avatars and thus produce a sort of 'meta-choreography.' Stereoscopic projections create an immersive environment, which permits the audience to participate substantially more closely on this communication than in traditional theatre settings. (Klaus Obermaier)