As for the similarities, both of them moved visual music from the screen out into three-dimensional space, and they interested in the transformative power of abstraction in motion and its correlation to music. Both of them found eastern metaphysics essential to their art because they believe that the “meditational practices provide a pure and untainted alternative to the ego-driven materialist ideologies of the West”. They wanted to eliminate the real world in their work, instead, focusing on the art generated in the mind.
Whitneys use new technology to create cosmic film experience. They say that “in sum, no visual motion worked the way musical motion works”. And they were convinced that it was because of the technology limitation, the solution lays in the technology. They used the motions of a pendulum to create a synchronized sound and images, and the images and sound are closely connected. They got to be the pioneer in the field of Cosmic-oriented visual music of early analog and digital effects, and following influence Jordan Belson. But different from what Whitneys had done and thought, Belson seems do not want to use machine-made in his work, rather spring from some kind of natural phenomena(148). Comparing to the Whitneys who use atomic energy to create visual music, Belson focuses on using natural resources. He “creates a kind of ideal world, a universe of linked senses in which all elements—sound, shape, color, motion—are no longer merely related but are absorbed into one another.”
The Vortex Concert series was one of the first tours which had over 100 performances. It changed the traditional way of combining music with realistic and concrete images into more abstract images, which involved the audience into performance themselves. It provided the audience a new way of thinking and relating music and images, convincing that elegant art can also be connected to electronic music, can also be appreciated by the normal audience without a very high artistic background. The light show phenomenon spread fast through the whole European and America, influencing the entire audiovisual performances.