[NetBehaviour] Campos | Temporales Video

Thu Aug 31 06:06:32 CEST 2023

Continuing...

I trace the kind of work that I am doing back to various historical
practices. There's the whole tradition of "visual music" including various
color organs created in Europe, with a great many showing up in the first
half of the 20th century as technology offered solutions. Many of these
were intended for churches, concert halls, or dedicated architectural
spaces, since they often required fairly massive installations of lights
and equipment. One of the very first electronic instruments, Thaddeus
Cahill's telharmonium, was offered over wires as a musical service to high
end restaurants in  New York City, so I guess you could say that the
architectural presence of electronic music goes way back. The visual
counterpart of the voltages generated by massive magnetic coils was a
"singing" carbon arc lamp that produced both sound and light. And then
there are all the 60s light shows I was exposed to, for concert venues of
various sorts.

Intimate visual music might be the exception, until video appeared. Most
visual music works in the 20th century were intended for theatrical venues
(Oscar Fishinger, Mary Ellen Bute, John Whitney, etc.). There were some
small boxes designed by Nicolas Schöffer in the 1970s (ISTR) that were
intended for visual education in small classrooms. UNESCO took an interest
in these, though I don't know where they were ever presented to students.
Thomas Wilfred's lumia are also intimate, though best viewed in an
architectural space. I saw Schöffer's boxes at his studio in Paris, thanks
to the generosity of Eleonore Schöffer. I've never seen lumia in person.

Intermedia is the other wing that keeps me flying. Fluxus, of course, but
also the poetics of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. Math and metaphor
mediate my madness.

150 Media Stream's "video blades" are up to 3 meters high. The pixels are
1/3 cm on a side, so I addressed each and every pixel as an entity in my
code.

cheers,

Paul

On Sat, Aug 26, 2023 at 12:38 AM Paul Hertz <ignotus at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Johannes,
>
> Thanks, glad you enjoyed the work.
>
> The composer and I followed a fairly systematic plan of collaboration.
> Before we began work, we determined a number of forms and processes that
> could work in both visual and musical domains. We also considered that
> decisions about coordinating music and image would fall on a spectrum from
> independent (forms juxtaposed but with no common features or timing),
> intersected (some features shared, others free to vary), to complementary
> (fairly strict correspondence of a select number of properties in the music
> and the animation). Most of the time there are intersecting processes
> occurring, but rarely producing coincidental events. A rhythm in the music
> might be generated by exactly the same algorithm as patterns in space.
> Sometimes we had the same frequency of signal producing patterns as
> producing sound. Other times, I had rhythmic visual events that I knew to
> be generated by the same process as the musical events, but with somewhat
> different parameters, so that events would both coincide and diverge. At
> other times, the musical and visual events might be related more by
> metaphor than by structure -- the density of events might run parallel, or
> might diverge, with the visuals nearly empty while the music rushes on.
>
> Generally, the compositional techniques are not meant to be noticed. They
> are the scaffolding of our decisions, that we take away to reveal the work.
>
> Because the architectural space is an office building and because we had
> to run the animation and music as a loop, there was just ambient electronic
> music to accompany the animation on site. The ending was rather muted, even
> for the performances with the musicians (we were fortunate to have two
> performances and a studio recording). To make it more emphatic, I used
> large colorful shapes at the end, considering the final arrival at a
> symmetrical array as a sort of cadence. In a sense, the final animation is
> loud while the music is quiet, or the loudness of the cadence is given to
> the animation while the harmonic progression is given to the music.
>
> Will try to answer questions in your second paragraph tomorrow.
>
> best,
>
> Paul
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 25, 2023 at 9:21 AM Johannes Birringer via NetBehaviour <
> netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org> wrote:
>
>> fascinating beautiful work, very inspiring, Paul!
>>
>> thanks also for giving a bit of insight (website documentation) into your
>> visual process and the concept for having such visual/music, such animations
>> and the evolving [interactive] patterning (background and foreground). I
>> was mesmerized yet also began to question or wanting to interrogate the
>> evolving pattern (did you and the composer develop this together or is the
>> music irrespective of the visuals (though you mention your Rondo form)? - I
>> guess I ask whether the music can respond to an immersive environment
>> /projection as you seem to have created  it in this amazing glass house
>> (the lobby of 150 Riverside Plaza in Chicago?), or rather is it
>> fixed/controlled/composed? why so?
>> You mention an architectural-video-installation, thus could you please
>> expand a little, since i am interested in the historical side of your work
>> too, when did visual music (did Eno call it that) or projected visual
>> scenographies become coupled with architecture (Xenakis?), how did digital
>> software artists develop this further or not? and why did you decide on
>> what, to me (on the vimeo concert), looks a 'flat canvas', perhaps (if an
>> art reference is permitted) a Mondrianic kind of Agnes Martin painting
>> field becoming dynamic, motional?  (I say this as an admirer of Martin's
>> paintings and her book "Paintings, Writings, Remembrances). Or did you
>> perhaps see the massive 3D immersive spectacles (teamLab stuff, and other
>> current projection environments) as a trap? How did the glass architecture
>> change your visuals (was 150 Media Stream concert different from what you
>> posted now?).
>>
>> with regards
>> Johannes Birringer
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 25, 2023 at 6:29 AM Paul Hertz via NetBehaviour <
>> netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org> wrote:
>>
>>> I am very pleased to announce the release a video for my recent
>>> collaborative project Campos | Temporales. Campos is an "intermedia
>>> experience" where algorithmic animation and new music share formal
>>> structures in time and space to create a hybrid art form. Composer
>>> Christopher Walczak wrote the music, which was recorded at Experimental
>>> Sound Studio in Chicago. The work originated as a large scale video
>>> installation in a curated space in Chicago, 150 Media Stream.
>>>
>>> The video can be viewed on Vimeo:
>>> https://vimeo.com/856300250
>>> There's documentation on my website, soon to be updated:
>>> https://paulhertz.net/projects/Campos%20%7C%20Temporales
>>>
>>> Duration: 15:27
>>>
>>> In addition to this streaming version, we have a UHD version with
>>> concert quality audio.
>>>
>>> saludos,
>>>
>>> Paul
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>
>
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