Interactive Media Arts @ NYUSH
Title: Eyeball
Collaborators: Phyllis Fei, Yutong Lin, Hoiyan Guo
Performance Video
Abstract
Eyeball is a Lumia artwork that provides a synesthetic stimulus of the audience’s auditory and visual experience. It is an abstract, immersing, real-time audio-visual performance in which a self-built optical installation and digital technologies are well combined and embodied.
Julia H Schroder’s article “Graphic Notation” provides a concise history of musical graphic notation and its different approaches/categorization while guiding us in understanding its practical and aesthetic value. While it was a common practice for artists, especially abstract painters (Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian) in the first decades of the twentieth century to absorb inspiration from music, music graphics after 1950 is even more comparable to a traditional staff notation because its instructional nature – to guide a specific musical performance, is well integrated into its creation. The abstraction and freedom featured in a music graphics provide a new vision for musical performance which is highly expressive and individual, something that is limited by the rigid standard from traditional musical notation. During the preparation for our project 2 live performance, we tried practicing this novel approach to draw an overall instruction.
This is our graphic score to illustrate the acting process during the performance, reflecting the three roles of us – performance (Phyllis), visual effects (Yutong), and sound&music (Hoiyan). We three each can read the graphic score in terms of visual cues for action. Furthermore, the graphic score also indicates the duration and frequency of action which corresponds to the musical composition.
We composed five phases of the audio-visual performance, which are the introduction (A), transition (B), enhancing (C), climax (D), ending (E). The three components each have been choreographed to form the overall audio-visual experience and the emotional state.
Introduction: The goal of the intro phase is to set the tone of the visual and acoustic tone and slowly lead the audience to the experience, which can be described as gentle, ambient, and spatial.
Transition: During the transition phase, visual effects will be added to create more complexity and repetition to reflect the musical composition. The emotion of this phase can be described as ethereal.
Enhancing: The enhancing phase emphasizes the mysteriousness of the sound in terms of strong visuals. The color scheme and aesthetics are mean to stimulate a sensory response.
Climax: The Climax is the phase where the performance, sound, and visuals are at their strongest.
Ending: The ending echos with the introduction and slowly dies down.
Both the Whitneys and Belson found Eastern metaphysics, which was able to develop the spiritual side to people’s consciousness, essential to their conceptual development of cosmic cinema art (148). In comparison to the stillness, relevance to real objects in painting, their work broke down these conventional restrictions and eliminated representational imagery and any association with the real world. Colors, amorphous forms, and constant motion replaced plain lines, hence, their work became non-objective. Their use of music as accompaniment examined the transformative power of abstraction in motion and its correlation to music, which built up synthetic sound/image relationships. Their visual-music films, developed from their religious belief system — Eastern metaphysics, sought for spirituality. They created a super-sensory environment for spectators and were mind-expanding.
Differences cannot be neglected though works from the Whitneys and Belson shared a lot in common. John and James Whitney managed to weave art, science, and spirituality together into a coherent visual-music form. They generated sound from the motion of a pendulum, shaped and formed mandalic imagery with the innovative “atomic” language with an attempt to approximate mind forms. They used mandala form to reveal some truth about the structure of the universe, for James in particular, “these truths lay not in the natural world but in the mind” (132). The Whitneys’ films tried to create an ideal world of linked senses in which sound, shape, color, motion are absorbed into one another. The Whitneys’ work was of great inspiration of Belson’s cosmic cinema creation. Unlike the Whitneys who used contemporary technology to push visual music into new cosmic dimensions, Belson practiced both old and new technology, including standard animation, optical printing, lasers, and liquid crystals (148). Belson created electronic sounds by himself, and the music-to-image relationship in his films became extremely tight. Belson’s films involved meditational practices that shorten the distance between art and people, made art possible to operate directly on the body and mind.
Belson’s cooperation with electronic composer Henry Jacobs made great contribution to Vortex Concerts. Film contents became free of the frame, and visual music was able to move from the screen to a three-dimensional space. The environmental aspect of the concerts broke down the rectangle of the film frame and offered the audience a “sinking-in feeling” that extended the two-dimensional space of the canvas into deep space. Artists’ interest in sacred geometry and cosmic archetypes was implied in light shows, which broke the line between the so-called “high art” and “low art.” High art and popular culture, abstraction and representation, the scientific and spiritual, the electronic and natural, the visual and aural all collaged together in overlapping sensations in light shows. Not only the content but also the way light shows were displayed became more approachable to the larger audience, flowing into mass culture.
Title: Interference
Description: It is an audiovisual sequencer that performs a generative composition of abstract, alien-like sounds and pixelated, distorted visuals that changes over time. Having the idea of visualizing futuristic signal interference from aliens, I explored the abstract nature of both sound and geometrical visual patterns and built a connection between them.
Demo
[For some reason my laptop microphone is broken and I cannot record the sound 🙁 Also, my laptop becomes extremely slow whenever I run Max so the screen recording is not smooth]Continue reading “Project 1 Documentation: Interference (Phyllis Fei)”
Thomas Wilfred is a Danish-born artist who is the pioneer in light art and invented the term lumia. He was trained in painting and sculpture prior to his pursuit of light as an art form. Inspired by the French Jesuit philosopher and mathematician Louis-Bertrand Castel’s light-projection instrument clavecin oculaire, Wilfred used lightbulbs, reflective aluminum or mirrors, and translucent glass with added color to develop Clavilux, which was invented for pure aesthetic experience without any complementary sound accompaniment (23). Later on, he designed the Clavilux Junoir which serves a dual purpose of creating lumia compositions as well as a modern household decorative object. There is a half-dozen “opuses” on the instrument and each one corresponds to a hand-painted “color record,” the operator is also able to turn the knobs to modify the “tempo of movements, intensity of color and levels of brightness and darkness” in a dark space (24).
Such unique light art compositions Wilfred created are meant solely for the silent experience. He believed that “no physical or psychological correspondences between music and color could be scientifically proven and that Lumia therefore did not belong under the umbrella of ‘color music'” (23). Instead, Wilfred seeks for the “primitive visual experience,” referring to humans’ ability to “perceive luminous forms and movements under natural circumstances” (27). I think this is also why I was reminded of the aurora, changing in palette and pattern, fading in and out in the night sky when experiencing his beautiful work. Another crucial factor that makes his work so naturalistic, immersive and psychologically pleasing is that he drew on new ideas of interstellar space, approaching light art both scientifically and philosophically. His belief of light being the foundation of human existence is implied through his spiritual and “intelligent” interpretation of the cosmos, as is presented in his artwork.
Reference
Keely Orgeman, A Radiant Manifestation in Space (Yale University Press, 2017).