[NetBehaviour] Campos | Temporales Video

Fri Sep 8 21:52:48 CEST 2023

Thanks Paul for your feedback and replies;
i read them with great interest, and will need to reflect more, before I
reply
as I think your references to visual music are completely different from
what i had in mind.
Video as an intimate visual music element (to be watched on a laptop
screen, as I did your work) is not something I had imagined to be of much
interest, that is what I asked about the (architectural) installation and
what you did there, and your feelings about the flat image on a screen.
best wishes

Johannes

On Thu, Aug 31, 2023 at 6:06 AM Paul Hertz <ignotus at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> -----   |(*,+,#,=)(#,=,*,+)(=,#,+,*)(+,*,=,#)|   ---
>>>> http://paulhertz.net/
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> NetBehaviour mailing list
>>>> NetBehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org
>>>> https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
>>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> NetBehaviour mailing list
>>> NetBehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org
>>> https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> -----   |(*,+,#,=)(#,=,*,+)(=,#,+,*)(+,*,=,#)|   ---
>> http://paulhertz.net/
>>
>
>
> --
> -----   |(*,+,#,=)(#,=,*,+)(=,#,+,*)(+,*,=,#)|   ---
> http://paulhertz.net/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.netbehaviour.org/pipermail/netbehaviour/attachments/20230908/044aba34/attachment.htm>