Reading Response 5 from Joyce

Belson and Whitneys are all important pioneers in the industry or innovation of visual music. The shared the same essential, which is the Eastern metaphysics. Similar to the Whitneys, Belson desired the elimination of representational imagery and any association with the real world. The Whitneys created a completely new type of visual music, in both appearance and sound the works are electronic. What’s more, reenergized visual music by bringing three disparate vectors together. These two brothers had a great passion for creating new technology — they have invented Yantra and Lapis, which “not just a work of art but “an attempt to approximate mind forms.” Additionally, neither of them could have succeeded without each other. James’ work would not have been possible without John. John thinks no visual motion worked the way musical motion works. His work even inspired the special-effects artists of Hollywood. Whitney’s films seem to create 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.

While Whitney’s used contemporary technology to push visual music into new cosmic dimensions, Belson, who based in San Francisco, arrived at a similar place through the use of both old and new technology, including standard animation, optical printing, lasers, and liquid crystals. Unlike the Whitneys, whose small atomic globules seem to spotlight new technology, Belson never used an image that bespoke its origins. His work is trying to break down the boundaries between painting and cinema, fictive space and real space, entertainment and art. Belson and Jacobs were moving visual music from the screen out into three-dimensional space. The environmental aspect of the concerts and the breakdown of the rectangle of the film frame, which, as Jacobs suggested, “set visual music off in another direction, one that would attempt to involve the spectator in more fundamental ways, altering his or her consciousness to a greater extent.”

Brakhage, the Whitneys, and Belson were all interested in the transformative power of abstraction in motion and its correlation to music. According to Joshua White, who described the feeling of watching the Vortex Concerts, “everything gets into sync, and you sync it in your mind. …the very abstraction of the light show gave each person a personal experience.” Standing on an important transition of art during history, the films played a significant role as abstraction shifted from a concern with “depicting” things. Therefore, the distance between the viewer and the art object closed. These films must be seen as extensions of shifts in the general culture. Visual-music films are fundamentally bound with what Youngblood termed the “Paleo Cybernetic Age”, an era in which television was beginning to shrink the world, computers were beginning to extend the human mind, and space travel was suddenly possible. Though space travel is still not that easy today, those arts enable human beings to flourish in the field of human arts and keep up with the trend of the times. The light show is an art form derived from the exploding development of the visual show. Different from the Vortex Concerts or normal visual music performance, the light show drew together a wide variety of practices to create an immersive visual and sound experience. It offered a neutral place in which high art and popular culture, abstraction and representation, where all kinds of different arts could all be collaged together. As the ultimate synaesthetic experience, the interest in sacred geometry and cosmic archetypes finally burst out of the confines of art and flowed into the sea of mass culture. With the population of the light show, people around the world, especially those who are from London, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, can have paintings, film, color organs, and music came together, enjoying the mixture of colorful art forms. 

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