Compiled September 2004
The focus in these notes is to illicit some key terms that are at work and can be at work in visual work / interart medium works that work with the language of visual and the language of music to create a unified art work. Many of the resources that are linked have video clips online to preview works.
These key terms are only one aspect of each work presented. The term and the example are to show the wide range of works that are created. They are meant to be thought provoking and yet at some level identify the ideas at work in visual music type art works and in particular the musical ideas at work in visual music type art works, and to provide one example of a path through looking at visual music work.
all types of actions, artefacts,
noises, images, and movement into the performance spaceONLINE CLIP AT:
http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Cage.html
B.Galeyev (1960s) Russia
"ETERNAL MOVEMENT" (wide-screen light-musical film, 1969, 35-mm)
The music is taken from "Electronic Poem" of E.Varese
ONLINE CLIP http://prometheus.kai.ru/vehdv_e.htm
offline 043.avi
Lots of clips for example
Prometheus
The small tryptich
Dance of vertical lines
ballad for bernet
Dance of Vertical Lines (05.avi)
http://prometheus.kai.ru/ogl_e.htm
Give expression to full range
of human experience – space, composition, motion, sound, movement,
light.Lazlo Moholy-Nagy declared that only the synthesis of the theater's essential formal components space, composition, motion, sound, movement, and light into an organic whole could give expression to the full range of human experience. http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Moholy.html
Light Shadow Play
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/licht-raum-modulator/
Walter Ruttmann Light-Play Opus 1
Premiered in
1921, Ruttmanns Opus 1 is the first abstract or absolute work in film
history. Instead of containing depictions of reality, it consists entirely
of the colors and shapes already formulated in Ruttmanns Painting With
Light manifesto. In 1919, he writes that, after nearly a decade, he finally masters
the technical difficulties struggled with as early as 1913 while executing
his formulated idea. He also writes that one has to work with film as though
using a paintbrush and paint. Up to protecting his work by a patent in 1920,
this artistically-motivated necessity born of new technical means leads to
Ruttmann producing abstract and painterly image sequences in his films.
Following the neglected Opus 1 come three other purely abstract films. These too, are painstakingly colored by hand. That each film has an original score composed especially for its production highlights another difference to the absolute films of Hans Richter or Oskar Fischinger, which transposed in images music that already existed.
ONLINE VIDEO CLIP
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/opus1/
The second central motive for artistic work with audio-visual media lies in their aesthetic potential to create image and sound experiences that have never been seen or heard before, in other words art forms that go beyond all known genres. Thus in 1919
Walter Ruttmann designed an
art for the eye that differs from painting in that it is time-based (like
music). And so a type of artist will emerge who is quite new and previously
only latently in existence, placed somewhere between painting and music. And
this new art can definitely expect to reach a considerably wider audience
than painting has.[5] This idea takes on concrete form in the absolute
films made in the 1920s by Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter and
others. Kurt Weill produced an equivalent idea for absolute radio art in
1925, in which an army of new, unheard sounds that the microphone could
produce artificially was to make possible something like an absolute,
soulful work of art, floating above the earth.
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/overview_of_media_art/forerunners/print/
Hans Richter
Viking Eggeling Diagonal Symphonie 1925
b 1880 in Lund (SWE), died in 1925
in Berlin; since 1897 works as a book dealer in Germany, later as an independent
artist in Paris; during World War I he teaches drawing and sports in Zurich
(CH), where he is introduced to the circle of Dadaists and creates first
sketches for image rolls and musical painting; 1920 first film experiments
and collaboration with Hans Richter; moves to Berlin in 1921; 1925 premiere
of the Diagonal-Symphonie.
ONLINE VIDEOCLIP
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/artist/eggeling/biography/
Full Video on Neil O Connors Thesis DVD (2003)
Oskar Fischinger Composition
in Blue/Light Concerto no.1
Surfaces dominate in the abstract animated film Komposition in Blau/ Lichtkonzert
Nr.1 (Composition in Blue / Light Concert No. 1). Colorful geometric figures
are set in rhythmic motion. The music from Nicolais The Merry Women of
Windsor is impressively visualized through a blending of form and color.
Fischinger created wooden cubes and cylinders as three-dimensional animated
models, approximately as tall as a cigarette, some of them painted and others
covered with fabric. At first the set seems to reveal a room. But then the
floor begins to reflect the geometric figures. Cubes perfectly-aligned in
a row, forming a flat mosaic-like surface, tumble apart to form a stairway.
In this perpetually changing universe, a cylinder pounds at the floor and
sets off a series of waves, and a decorative, flat circle flies into the
empty space. The beauty of the colored, geometric forms—a yellow rectangle
descends gracefully into the frame—escalates to the frenzied magic
of the impossible.
(Source: William Moritz: Oskar Fischinger,
in: Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt am Main, Optische Poesie. Oskar Fischinger
Leben und Werk, Kinematograph Nr. 9, 1993, p. 42)
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/komposition-in-blau/
sound ornaments
Fischinger was born in Gelnhausen, on June 22, 1900. He studied organ buildung and then mechanical engineering in Frankfurt am Main and successfully completed his engineering studies in 1922. [...] In 1923 Fischinger went to Munich, where he worked with Louis Seel at the Mnchner Bilderbogen and made several films of his own, all of which are now lost. He worked with Alecander Lszlo from 1925 to 1926 and designed the projections for his partners color piano. [...] In Berlin he worked for UFA and was sought out for his expertise in special effects for films such as Langs Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon). [...] He worked intensively on sound experiments and production of synthetic sound and was the first ot use a three-color system (Gasparcolor, an invention of the Hungarian Bla Gaspar) in avant-garde films. [...] He received sporadic assignments [after his emigration to the USA in 1936], but a contract with Welles came to nothing because the company went bankrupt. He took up painting and received very modest support for himself and his family through a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. Motion Painting No. 1 led to a falling out with the foundation. Aside from a few commercials he did not make any films in the twenty-year period from 1947 until his death. [...] He died in Hollywood on January 31, 1967.
(source: Goethe-Institut
(ed.), The German Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s, exhib. cat., Mnchen,
1989, p. 28f.)
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/artist/fischinger/biography/
artist Jules Engels
Interesting statement
he makes about movement, colour.
http://www.netropolitan.org/engel/engel_statement.html
Norman McLaren (1960s and 1970s) [THIS
GUY IS WORTH FURTHER RESEARCH]
Stills from horizontal lines
Matthew Jarron said about McLaren on 22nd June 2001
If you've been put off seeing these because they're 'only cartoons', think again. McLaren (a Scot working mainly in Canada) made some of the most daring uses of film ever recorded. In early works like Boogie Doodle he made visual representations of music by painting directly onto the film, and later created artificial soundtracks using a similar technique. In Synchromy he actually photographed the soundtrack itself. His films cover an incredible range from the hypnotic minimalism of Lines Horizontal (which is just that!) to the stunning power of Pas de Deux, a combination of live action and optical effects creating perhaps the most beautiful film ever made. Trust me, you don't know what cinema can do until you've seen Norman McLaren.\
ONLINE CLIPS in
a museum website created by Canadian (nfb) studions - animation showcase
resource – select corridors near end of page (history section)
Note clips embedded in the content of corridors
http://www.nfb.ca/animation/html/en/06_museum/nfbaa_06_museum_e.html
Specific online clips
Begone Dull Care/Caprice en couleurs 1949 (Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambert
A lively interpretation in fluid lines and color, of Jazz music. Painting directly on film ONLINE CLIP

A Chairy Tale (1957) A fairy tale in the modern manner.collaborated with Evelyn Lambart ONLINE CLIP

Pas de deux (1968)
ballet with cinematic effects, exposing the same frames as many as 10 times,
norman creates a multiple image of the ballerina and her partner. http://mediasphere.nfb.ca/E/recherche/index.epl?mode=titleinfo&type=keyword&expr=Norman%20McLaren&id=10470&catid=&ofs=0&extract=previews
Pen Point Discussion (1951)
Norman McLaren explains how he makes
synthetic sound on film. With an oscilloscope he first demonstrates what
familiar sounds look like on the screen; how sound shapes up opn a films
sound track, then what synthetic sounds look like when drawn directly on
film. This technique is demonstrated in Dots and Loops
http://mediasphere.nfb.ca/E/recherche/index.epl?mode=titleinfo&type=keyword&expr=Norman%20McLaren&id=10681&catid=&ofs=0&extract=previews
Short and Suite (1959)
A pattern of colours and light Capturing the moods of music written for a jazz ensemble
Synchromy/Synchromie (1971) ******
Here are pyrotechnics of the
keyboard, but only with a camera to play the tune. To make this film
Norman employed novel optical techniques to compose the piano rhythms of
the sound track. These he then moved in multicolour onto the picture area
of the screen so that, in effect, you see what you hear. It is synchronization
of image and sound in the truest sense of the word.
LOADS OF CLIPS INFO – STILLS and some CLIPS
MORE McLAREN ONLINE CLIPS AND INFO FROM A DIFFERENT SOURCE (real media Clips)
http://www.nfb.ca/animation/ideas/voxars/html/en/kanbara/index.html
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MORE ONLINE CLIPS at
Around is around
http://cmm.nfb.ca/E/titleinfo/index.epl?id=13390&sid=7e99de22f8f2c1e61068032d5aa49289&coll=onf
Lines Vertical (1962) , Mosaic (1965)
ONLINE CLIP at
Rene Jodaoin
Colloborator with Norman McLaren

Notes on a triangle 1966
The triangle is shown splitting into some three hundred transformations, dividing and subdividing with grace and symmetry to the music of a waltz
Gayle Thomas Quilt Counterpointe (1996)
Quilt motifs to music, an abstract
animated film, using computer and experimental techniques in choreographing
quilt motifs and designs to music. Music Norman Roger ONLINE CLIP AND STILLS
Pierre Hebert Around perception (1968)
An early experiment in employing computers
to animate film. The result is a dazzling vibration of geometric
forms in vivid colour.Sound effects are created by registering sound shapes
directly on the sound track of the film.
http://cmm.nfb.ca/E/titleinfo/index.epl?id=11877&sid=7e99de22f8f2c1e61068032d5aa49289&coll=onf
Light, movement,
design, and duration - Elemental approach
Einstein on the
Beach, Robert
Wilson (filmmaker) and Philip Glass (composer)
Premiere: July 25, 1976
For Wilson, the work
represented a move away from the complex mise en scene of his earliest
plays towards the stripped-down geometry of his later work: a precise statement
of light, movement, design, and duration.
Information on how they went about creating this work at:
http://www.robertwilson.com/works/masterEinstein.htm
http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Wilson.html

Tony Conrad (1960s) US
Tony Conrad became
active in performance and music composition during the 1960s, and was associated
with the founding of both minimal music and underground film in New York
City.
http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$artistdetail?CONRADT
Cycles of 3's and 7's is
a performance in which the harmonic intervals that would ordinarily be performed
by a musical instrument are represented through the computation of their
arithmetic relationships or frequency ratios. Conrad and the other members
of hte Theater of Eternal Music-LaMonte Young, Marian Zazeela, John Cale,
and Angus MacLise - composed and performed "dream music" in the
early '60s. This seminal group was a major influence on what became known
as minimalist music. Conrad's tape points to an important intersection of
conceptual and performative experimentation in which the theoretical basis
of sound and visual imagine tools were explored by musicians, filmmakers,
videomakers, and electronic instrument designers.
ONLINE VIDEOCLIP
http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?CYCLESOF3S
Article: Early Minimalism and Beyond: Tony Conrad in Music, Film, and
Video
http://www.geocities.com/hstencil/tonyconrad1.html
Peter Bode
In Music on Triggering
Surfaces, (1978) Bode constructs
an interface between audio and video systems. The luminance information (voltage)
from the visual images traversed by the black dot is routed to an oscillator
to produce the audio signal, which varies according to the changing luminance.
The video image itself then triggers the audio. The shifting grey-scale of
the image becomes a two-dimensional sound map or audio score. This tape was
produced at the Experimental Television Center.
Remix – reuse (film and
soundtrack)
Martin Arnold (19?s)
Martin Arnold is the guest of honour of this year's film programme. He is
renowned for his inimitable style of transforming short, seemingly insignificant
scenes from old Hollywood movies into hysterical mechanical ballets.
Arnolds breakthrough film, pice touche, is based on a single 18-second shot from The Human
Jungle (dir. Joseph M. Newman, 1954). Woman sitting in a chair. Man enters
the room. Man and woman kiss. Exit man.
Diligently edited frame-by-frame over a period of 18 months with a home-made
optical printer, the film is an ecstatically jerky and stuttering close-reading of
a commonplace mainstream movie scene. The entire soundtrack, too, which sounds
like a mixture of looped hip hop beats and vintage Steve Reich, is collaged
original material.
http://www.avantofestival.com/avanto2001/2001_screenings/fv_arnold.html
ONLINE CLIP AT: www.re-voir.com
walking man, expanding
a simple image into increasingly complex permutations and arriving at what
Emshwiller calls a "visual fugue" in time and space. Emshwiller
uses various techniques to develop his images: fast-forward, rewind, multiple
keying, audio modulations, etc. With its rhythmic repetition of images and
concatenation of sound, this tape represents the fusion of audio, video,
and dance explored by many artists during hte period. According to Emshwiller,
this tape was an attempt to use video techniques in an essentially musical
structure
synthesising human perception Stephen Beck Video Weavings (1976)
Inspired by the analogy between weaving (vertical warp threads traversed
by horizontal weft threads) and the construction of the television image
(vertical and horizontal scans of an electron gun), Stephen Beck built the
Video Weaver in 1974, and produced Video Weavings in 1976. The patterns in
this tape are based on sequences of colors in dynamic mathematical progressions,
inspired by non-representational Islamic art. Beck was also intrigued with
the problem of synthesizing aspects of human perception. Arriving at video
through music,
http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?VIDEOWEAVI
Stephen created the direct video synthesizer
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/direct-video-synthesizer/
Gary Hill Soundings (1979)
Soundings is a meditation on the phenomenology of sound, the translation of
image into sound and sound into image through a series of experiments on an audio
speaker. The speaker delivers sound, both audibly and visibly, with the camera
revealing the minute vibrations of the speaker's cone. Referring to the cloth
covering of the speaker as a "skin," Hill intones, "This is the
skin of space where I voice from." The materialized voice is clearly an
extension of the artist's intention. Hill proceeds to bury, puncture, burn, and
drown the audio speaker in an effort to physically alter or overwhelm the sound
coming out of it, the sound of his own voice. Each carefully constructed experment
explores the convluence of sound, image, and text, suggesting a kind of concretized
poetry or "electronic linguistics
ONLINE CLIP (and source of above)
http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?SOUNDINGS
Gabriel Corchero Marea Negra [Black Tide] - multimedia interactive exhibit. (2000)
A collection of interactive poems and sound landscapes, with video projections,
CD-ROM and Internet, Black Tide creates an atmosphere of immersion
with a great audiovisual impact: a symbolic space of lights and shadows in which
the artist evokes a unique architecture of the uncertain, made up of dislocated
words and viscous silences.
The piece is conceived as a poetic
space inviting reflective thought. It alludes to the black tide, taken
to be a metaphor of an altered state, marked by ambiguity, disorientation
and altered parameters of time and space. At the same time it establishes
relationships between the ecosystem and the info-system. In this sense,
it recognizes one field of analogies and resonance between the pollution
of our natural environment and the environment of media
The superimposing of visual, audio and olfactory impressions produces disconcerting effects. It provokes a state of alert and suggests a critical reflection that puts the senses in question. Once again it shows that in the end it is the brain that perceives and conceives of the realities of our natural and media environments.
http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/ecorchero.html
concrete cinema
Between 1960 and 1975, Pierre Schaeffer, the famous French inventor of 'musique
concrete', presided over the Research Service of French TV & Radio (ORTF).
Under his direction, this Service de la recherch produced countless experimental
films and videos; largely animations & abstract works, but also documentaries
and live-action films. How many exactly is difficult to say - the scholarship
is threadbare, even in French. ..
Several Directors who made their early works upon Schaeffer's commission would become darlings of the European art cinema - Chris Marker, Jan Lenica, & Walerian Borowczyk among them. Many others remain unaccountably ignored, and are still awaiting the recognition their extraordinary works should have long ago mandated them.
http://www.liquidarchitecture.org.au/la4/concrete_essay.html
Granular Synthesis POL (1998)
In contrast to more or less analytic
observations in the visual media, artists like Jan Peter E. R. Sonntag
in his installation modern minimal disco (since 1995) or Granular Synthesis
in their performance POL (1998) exert direct influence on the physical
perception of the spectator and produce synaesthetic experiences. By transferring
sensory impressions from one medium to another, as with the transformation
of sound to vibration, the usual link of their mode of representation to
certain media is broken through and extended into other areas. In installations
or performances, they make sounds physically felt and add an additional
sensory element to acoustic perception.
Mixing live with the aid of software they developed themselves, the two artists sample, shift, loop and amplify tiny synthetic units of image and sound – which they call 'grains' – of the singer Diamanda Galas to produce a condensed, invasive stimulation of the senses.
ONLINE CLIP
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/pol/
Dennis Miller Second Thoughts
Second Thoughts is an original 3D animation with original electronic music. This author created both the images and the sound.

Beautiful 3D textures
ONLINE CLIP at:
http://www.siggraph.org/artdesign/gallery/S01/48.html
Electroacoustic music
For live musicians, performers, tape and video
JunkBox Fraud Music By Donnacha Dennehy, Video by Gerry O Brien and Hugh Reynolds
Contexts
Futurists F.T. Marinetti | Futurist Cinema <1916>
http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Futurist.html
Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells by Carlo Carr
http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/paintsound.html
Dada (1920s)
Viking Eggeling Diagonal-Symphonie, 1923
Man RayReturn to Reason
More a work in experimental Dadaism
than a film, Le Retour la raison was the first film to be made by the
celebrated surrealist artist, Man Ray.
VIDEO CLIP http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/retour-a-la-raison/
Bauhaus Movement Lazlo Moholy-Nagy (1920s)
http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Moholy.html
Collaborative Performances and non-traditional performances (1940s and 1950s)
John Cage Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns
Fluxus Movement (1960s)
Dick Higgins calls for intermedia
Happenings, electronic theater, performance art, and interactive installations (1960s).
Concrete Cinama (1960s and 1970s)
Between 1960 and 1975,
Pierre Schaeffer, the famous French inventor of 'musique concrete', presided
over the Research Service of French TV & Radio (ORTF). Under his direction,
this Service de la recherch produced countless experimental films and
videos; largely animations & abstract works, but also documentaries
and live-action films. How many exactly is difficult to say - the scholarship
is threadbare, even in French.
Essay: Concrete Cinema
http://www.liquidarchitecture.org.au/la4/concrete_essay.html
[This topic could be studied under montage also]
Light
Colour
The manipulated image
Interesting article on line about The Manipulated image by
keith Griffiths, good to read for anyone who maybe interested in the context
of the manipulated image.
http://www.animateonline.org/features/0002.html
Orchestral Music
Electroacoustic Music
Electronic Music
Twentieth century artists have
continued the effort to heighten the viewer's experience of art by integrating
traditionally separate disciplines into single works. Modern experience,
many of these artists believed, could only be evoked through an art that
contained within itself the complete range of perception. "Old-fashioned" forms
limited to words on a page, paint on a canvas, or music from an instrument,
were considered inadequate for capturing the speed, energy and contradictions
of contemporary life. In their 1916 manifesto "The Futurist Cinema," F.T.
Marinetti and his revolutionary cohorts declared film to be the supreme
art because it embraced all other art forms through the use of (then) new
media technology. Only cinema, they claimed, had a "totalizing" effect
on human consciousness.
."And so the arts are encroaching one upon another, and from a proper use of this encroachment will rise the art that is truly monumental." – Wassily Kandinsky
http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/overture/integration.html
Overviews of the area – comprehensive sites with video links, excellent context for any research or getting to know the area more
1.
Surveying the First Decade: Volume 1 and Volume 2 Anthology
This comprehensive package on the history of experimental and independent videoonline info and video clips.
Themes
Volume 1
http://www.vdb.org/packages/survey/volumeone.html
Volume 2
http://www.vdb.org/packages/survey/volumetwo.html
2.
Artmuseum Net
http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/overture/overture.html
Broad themes that underscore an "untold" story behind the evolution of multimedia: its precedents, unsung heroes, and the extraordinary creative work and visionary thinking of artists and scientists.
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Broad Themes
Birth of a New Medium
Integration of the Arts
Through the looking glass
Etc..
3.
Great Historical Resource on Norman McLaren
Canadian (nfb) animation
showcase resource – select corridors (history section)
http://www.nfb.ca/animation/html/en/06_museum/nfbaa_06_museum_e.html
4.
MEDIASPHERE
Find a video
Teaching Tools
Web Projects
Good animation resource linked to canadas nfb animation/documentary/experimental film
Clips and stills and info
http://mediasphere.nfb.ca/E/index.php
<5.
MEDIAARTNET

Index of themes in overview of media art
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/overview_of_media_art/
Forerunners of media art in the first half of the twentieth century by Dieter Daniels
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/overview_of_media_art/forerunners/
print version
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/overview_of_media_art/forerunners/print/
Audio Art
Golo Fllmer
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/overview_of_media_art/audio/
Technological Constructions of Space-Time - Aspects of Perception by Heike Helfert
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/overview_of_media_art/perception/
Virtual Narrations
From the crisis of storytelling to new narration as mental potentiality
Ske Dinkla
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/overview_of_media_art/narration/
6.
CLIPS online organised into categories
Eg experimental film, animation
Research by Maura McDonnell for music and image course, masters mmt 2004 – 2005
www.soundingvisual.com/visualmusic