Music to Your Eyes
At Hirshhorn, Multimedia Excursion Doesn't Go Far
By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Original Article Here
Try playing some music on your computer. Chances are, when you stick in that CD or access those MP3s, a swirl of color will appear on-screen, throbbing and pulsing in time to your tunes.
These sound-and-light displays, churned out by "visualization" programs built into most of today's media players, don't serve any practical purpose. They're about simple sensory enjoyment and about giving us a glimpse of a bold future when our separate senses will collapse into a single pleasure -- a time when categories such as "music" and "video" and "art" and "graphics" are supposed to dissolve, leaving us bathing in a brave new world of multimedia sensations.
The funny thing is, that future has been here for almost 100 years, hidden away in obscure corners of avant-garde art and music and filmmaking. The big summer show opening today at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum tracks how radical artists have been crossing over between sight and sound for ages, even though most experts and museums have rarely taken note of this important trend.
The Hirshhorn exhibition, titled "Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900," includes works that few of us have ever seen before, by artists we've barely heard of, using media and techniques whose names don't even ring a bell. It gives us a chance to explore life on the artistic fringes and take in some of the mind-bending sights and sounds that have come out of them.
The show includes some paintings, sure, by artists as well known as Man Ray, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. But there's also a room devoted to Thomas Wilfred's "lumia," an art form the American inventor first developed in the 1920s. It sets nebulas of color swirling across translucent screens.
ad_icon
Over the first half of the 20th century, artists turned out "color organs" with names such as the Synchrome Kineidoscope, the Clavilux, the Lumigraph or the Optophonic Piano. Some of these Rube Goldberg contraptions, salvaged from dark corners and displayed in working order in this show, demand a couple of operators to make them go. They produce elaborate displays of light and color that either accompany music, or that are meant as silent "visual symphonies."
These instruments mostly gave way to abstract films, at first made using standard animation skills and then, in the 1950s, by way of more advanced technologies that opened new frontiers in animation. (Computers were adopted early on for the special effects of abstract film. George Lucas owes a debt to a number of "visual musicians" who simply wanted to make swarms of colored dots go dancing across space.)
In the psychedelic 1960s, certain experimental artists and collectives (with names like the Single Wing Turquoise Bird and the Joshua Light Show) emerged from the artistic margins to design the elaborate projections that ran at concerts by Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd and the Who. This exhibition includes archival footage from some of these shows, but the art form will come fully to life only this weekend, with the Hirshhorn's one-time "Cosmic Drift" event. On Saturday night, the museum will be staying open from 9:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. The show itself will act as a kind of art-historical backdrop for a program of live light-and-sound performances that will take place in the Hirshhorn's circular courtyard. It'll be a groovy trip, man.
Hirshhorn curator Kerry Brougher -- who conceived the exhibition with his colleague Judith Zilczer and Jeremy Strick, director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, where "Visual Music" premiered in February -- argues in his catalogue essay that the rock-concert spectacles of the 1960s give a rare example of vanguard art infiltrating the mainstream. The infiltration was so thorough, in fact, that few of us are likely to realize that those light shows had their roots in esoteric art ideas born 60 years before.
Those took off from a simple notion and had a simple aim.
The notion was to take the novelty of abstract art, so radical before World War I that it could hardly be imagined, and justify it by comparison to music. If a Beethoven string quartet could be understood and admired on its own terms, without imagining that it painted a sonic picture of the world, visual art should have the same freedom to escape from rendering reality. The notes and timbres and structures of music could be compared to the colors and textures and forms of a painting; a talented artist could assemble them into a visual "composition" every bit as affecting, meaningful and praiseworthy as anything that goes on in a fancy concert hall.
There were even shreds of scientific evidence in support of such crossing over between the visual and musical arts. In a rare neurological condition known as "synaesthesia," the sensory systems in certain people's brains are cross-wired. When a given sound enters their ears, they "see" -- in their mind's eye, at least -- a color.
Another synaesthete might take in a color or shape, and find that the optical signal has been carried to the brain's auditory system, producing a sonic experience at the same time as the visual one. The modern French composer Olivier Messiaen was said to "see" flashes of color that corresponded to chords in the music he played. Such stories provided a kind of real-life analogy to, and justification for, the "visual music" proposed by early abstractionists.
Kandinsky is generally credited as the first artist to produce purely abstract works of art. He, however, took the pairing of pictorial abstraction with musical abstraction, understood by some of his peers as nothing more than a useful analogy, and made it literal. He said that his paintings were meant to translate the specific qualities of music into visual terms. His "Impression III (Concert)" was made in response to a famous performance of Arnold Schoenberg's radically modern music held in Munich in early 1911. "The independent life of the individual voices in your composition is exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings," the artist wrote to the composer.
In 1916, under the influence of Kandinsky, the American Man Ray, based in Paris, painted his colorful "Symphony Orchestra," whose only recognizable feature is the keyboard of a piano.
Two other Americans, Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, tried to build an entire artistic movement, dubbed "Synchromism," around musical ideas. In their Synchromist manifesto, they insisted that "mankind has until now always tried to satisfy its need for the highest spiritual exaltation only in music. Only [musical] tones have been able to . . . transport us to the highest realms. . . . Yet color is just as capable as music of providing us with the highest ecstasies and delights."
Both tried to take the musical analogy as far as it could go, designing light-projecting machines that would make patterns of color and form play out in space over time, as the notes of music do.
Long after abstract painting had found its footing, and stopped needing the crutch of a musical analogy, notions of visual music continued to attract followers working in media that took place over time. There were those color organs, first, which eventually gave way to experimental film, capable of combining sound and abstract image without clumsy apparatuses. The 1930s bred various pioneers in abstract animation. Figures such as Len Lye and Oskar Fischinger (who at first worked on the popularization of visual music in Disney's "Fantasia," then fled the project) made geometric and biomorphic shapes go dancing across the movie screen, sometimes truly rivaling what leading abstract painters were doing on their static canvases.
Which leads -- by way of this show's psychedelic spectacles, zooming computer graphics and recent kinetic light sculptures -- to your computer's media player. Which, if you think about it, isn't such a grand place for an art form to end up.
Many of the works in "Visual Music" suffer from the same problem as your computer's own "visual music" display: They provide wow-cool flashes of attractive light and shape that don't take long to lose their interest. There's something about trying to find visual equivalents for the sonic energy and verve of music that seems to push artists toward superficiality.
Despite this exhibition's subtitle, none of its artworks actually manages full-blown synaesthesia, truly crossing over between sound and vision. You'll not once feel you're hearing something just by looking at a piece in this show. And short of fulfilling that grand aim, its visuals tend to become illustrations of how we imagine music operates, rather than real rivals to the musical experience, or champions of a fully visual one.
In 1923, American painter Arthur Dove went to a Chinese restaurant, and, according to this exhibition's catalogue, he came away inspired. He went off and made an abstract picture that seems full of earthy, soy-sauce browns; of spikes that make me think of ginger's bite; of garlicky edges and angles. The only problem is, the mouthwatering sensations that I read out of Dove's artwork are not the ones he meant to put into it. Rather than "Wonton Visions," his painting is titled "Chinese Music."
Which goes to show that synaesthesia is always in the mind of the beholder, and that relying on such sensory crossovers doesn't get you all that far in art.
Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 is at the Hirshhorn Museum, on Independence Avenue at Seventh Street SW, through Sept. 11. Call 202-633-1000 or visit http://www.hirshhorn.si.edu/ .
This exhibition really seems to have put a foothold on the first attempts at understanding sound as a visual medium. As media becomes more and more closely tied it seems only inevitable that sound and visuals will merge in a much more seamless fashion than currently exists. I still feel it is necissary to have some form of grounding to this idea and that is where the Chladni tests are crucial. Pot driven phsychadilia is a form of exploration but really provides no answers for what is possible with sound and visuals combined.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
A Visionary Attempt To Catch Sight Of Sound
A Visionary Attempt To Catch Sight Of Sound
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Original Article Here
Anyone who has tried to describe a piece of music to someone else -- and that would be most everyone, including and especially music critics who do it for a living -- knows the dilemma at the core of the Hirshhorn's new exhibition, "Visual Music." Unless you use the specialist's language of musicology and talk in terms that only musicians would understand, to put music into words you must borrow ideas from other art forms and the senses to which they appeal. Making sense of music requires that we speak as if we have seen it, or smelled it, or felt it with our hands.
So flutes make bright tones, trombones dark ones. Composers, we say, work like architects, structuring sound, building arches of melody. At one moment, musicians may play dense or textured sounds, at another, thin and airy ones. Even the most basic musical terms -- high notes, low notes -- are described with spatial metaphors. What's the "high" point on a piano string?
"Visual Music" is about the history of a fantasy, the fantasy that these metaphors that let us describe music could become real and palpable. That the blues would look blue. That music that seems to pulse and throb and explode like a sunburst would actually do all these things right before one's very eyes. In showing this history, the exhibition also raises the question: Where does this fantasy come from? Why did composers, such as Alexander Scriabin at the beginning of the 20th century, start fantasizing about extending the symphonic ideal into the realm of light shows? And why did painters, such as Kandinsky, start fantasizing about making fugues in paint?
In part, it arises from feelings of inadequacy -- an inadequacy shared, it seems, by all the arts. The painter looks over the garden fence and sees the composer's audience rapt with emotion, sitting in hypnotic silence. So he strives for a new kind of image that has the mesmerizing power to make the viewer feel deeply, without having to be about something. Composers, frustrated that most music isn't about anything at all, return the compliment, writing narrative symphonies that strive for the storytelling power of epics -- hence program music. Writers such as James Joyce would seek to break free of the limits of their art form as well, especially the rules of grammar and the literal quality of words, to make language dance in the brain. Sometimes these experiments worked inasmuch as they produced interesting new works; rarely, if ever, did they work on the literal terms their creators imagined.
ad_icon
Decadence lurks behind all of this, the decadence of jaded palates, the decadence of aesthetes looking for ever greater kicks (and you can almost smell the marijuana haze coming off some of the trippier experiments in "Visual Music"). But so does idealism. The utopian mind, which craves to break free of the shackles of old art forms, has an ultimate fantasy. That fantasy is creating an entirely new art form so powerful in its allure that it will fashion a new audience, remade spiritually. The conservative mind loathes this sort of thing. What is the difference between an artist who seeks to refashion everything, right down to the way we hear or see, and an ideologue, selling a utopian brew for remaking the economy, the family or the state? People of more liberal disposition will respond: To solve intractable problems, it may well be necessary to reimagine everything, reinvent the soul, refashion the body, reconstruct the society. And why shouldn't artists be in the fore of that project?
But it's a bit of a disappointment, and a powerful object lesson offered by this exhibition, to see how small, and sometimes how silly, the grand visions of the future often are, and how easily they are absorbed into the everyday world as a kind of wallpaper, or background noise. Oskar Fischinger's 1942 film, "Radio Dynamics," a color fantasy of circles that swell off the screen, looks a lot like the opening of the Looney Tunes cartoon series by Warner Bros. The organic, fluid forms seen in a film by Elias Romero, from 1968-69, can be found for less than $20 on eBay -- in the form of a used lava lamp. To be fair, sometimes people who imagine grand futuristic visions -- whether artistic or scientific or political -- suffer from their own success: Their visions are assimilated so completely that in retrospect nothing about them seems very new.
"Visual Music" is essentially a study in metaphor, and often in the poverty of metaphor. Painters who glibly slapped titles such as "Symphony" or "Fugue" on their canvases were using metaphor on the cheap, borrowing the grandeur or prestige of musical forms to elevate the status of something that had nothing to do with music. When James Whitney, a filmmaker based in California in the 1960s, made an abstract film called "Lapis," he used music of the great Indian sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar. Looking for a visual equivalent, he offered up images that look very much like a Tibetan mandala -- in motion. The metaphorical reach here is small: Iconic Eastern music must look like iconic Eastern art. Imagine if an artist from China decided that the best visual metaphor for Beethoven was a Coca-Cola sign because both are Western.
"Visual Music" is an exhibition about aspiration, about goals that will sound very familiar to people today: breaking down barriers, thinking outside the box, inventing one's way out of dead ends. Man, a creature distinguished from animals essentially by his ability to make metaphor (to make one thing stand for another), reaches for metaphor first when confronted by challenges. Artists, at various points in the last century and a half, have felt themselves hemmed in by their own rules, and so tried to extend their art, metaphorically, into the realm of other art forms. But they were not alone. "Visual Music" is also a study in what might be called the propaganda of the future, the ways in which creative minds -- in this case often with the support of major corporations including IBM -- have struggled to make the new and terrifying more palatable, and perhaps beautiful.
Take, for example, Thomas Wilfred's 1959 "Study in Depth," commissioned by the Clairol Corp. for the lobby of its New York offices. It is a slowly evolving light show that looks like an aurora borealis twisting in space. It could easily be an image from the Hubble telescope. There's an implied metaphorical equivalence: The future is to the sorry moment we live in as this image is to anything you've ever seen in an old-fashioned art gallery. It is more alive, more beautiful, more dynamic. But look behind the screen, to the machine creating it, and you have a metaphor for metaphor itself: The future is made by a set of dinged-up reflective panels, rotating on what looks like an old oil drum. Electrical cords run in and out like tubes into a dying patient. Metaphors that promise much, whether it's a new art form or a new view of science or the world at large, are often just a screen, and it's always worth looking behind them.
I found this article to be rather compelling in thinking about the ways people preceive things in different areas of the world. How would someone from the east explain Beethoven. This idea of placing sound into visuals needs to be rooted in something specific, something scientific and mathamatic. The Chladni patterns are the closest thing to a physical constant at which to measure sounds visual success.
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Original Article Here
Anyone who has tried to describe a piece of music to someone else -- and that would be most everyone, including and especially music critics who do it for a living -- knows the dilemma at the core of the Hirshhorn's new exhibition, "Visual Music." Unless you use the specialist's language of musicology and talk in terms that only musicians would understand, to put music into words you must borrow ideas from other art forms and the senses to which they appeal. Making sense of music requires that we speak as if we have seen it, or smelled it, or felt it with our hands.
So flutes make bright tones, trombones dark ones. Composers, we say, work like architects, structuring sound, building arches of melody. At one moment, musicians may play dense or textured sounds, at another, thin and airy ones. Even the most basic musical terms -- high notes, low notes -- are described with spatial metaphors. What's the "high" point on a piano string?
"Visual Music" is about the history of a fantasy, the fantasy that these metaphors that let us describe music could become real and palpable. That the blues would look blue. That music that seems to pulse and throb and explode like a sunburst would actually do all these things right before one's very eyes. In showing this history, the exhibition also raises the question: Where does this fantasy come from? Why did composers, such as Alexander Scriabin at the beginning of the 20th century, start fantasizing about extending the symphonic ideal into the realm of light shows? And why did painters, such as Kandinsky, start fantasizing about making fugues in paint?
In part, it arises from feelings of inadequacy -- an inadequacy shared, it seems, by all the arts. The painter looks over the garden fence and sees the composer's audience rapt with emotion, sitting in hypnotic silence. So he strives for a new kind of image that has the mesmerizing power to make the viewer feel deeply, without having to be about something. Composers, frustrated that most music isn't about anything at all, return the compliment, writing narrative symphonies that strive for the storytelling power of epics -- hence program music. Writers such as James Joyce would seek to break free of the limits of their art form as well, especially the rules of grammar and the literal quality of words, to make language dance in the brain. Sometimes these experiments worked inasmuch as they produced interesting new works; rarely, if ever, did they work on the literal terms their creators imagined.
ad_icon
Decadence lurks behind all of this, the decadence of jaded palates, the decadence of aesthetes looking for ever greater kicks (and you can almost smell the marijuana haze coming off some of the trippier experiments in "Visual Music"). But so does idealism. The utopian mind, which craves to break free of the shackles of old art forms, has an ultimate fantasy. That fantasy is creating an entirely new art form so powerful in its allure that it will fashion a new audience, remade spiritually. The conservative mind loathes this sort of thing. What is the difference between an artist who seeks to refashion everything, right down to the way we hear or see, and an ideologue, selling a utopian brew for remaking the economy, the family or the state? People of more liberal disposition will respond: To solve intractable problems, it may well be necessary to reimagine everything, reinvent the soul, refashion the body, reconstruct the society. And why shouldn't artists be in the fore of that project?
But it's a bit of a disappointment, and a powerful object lesson offered by this exhibition, to see how small, and sometimes how silly, the grand visions of the future often are, and how easily they are absorbed into the everyday world as a kind of wallpaper, or background noise. Oskar Fischinger's 1942 film, "Radio Dynamics," a color fantasy of circles that swell off the screen, looks a lot like the opening of the Looney Tunes cartoon series by Warner Bros. The organic, fluid forms seen in a film by Elias Romero, from 1968-69, can be found for less than $20 on eBay -- in the form of a used lava lamp. To be fair, sometimes people who imagine grand futuristic visions -- whether artistic or scientific or political -- suffer from their own success: Their visions are assimilated so completely that in retrospect nothing about them seems very new.
"Visual Music" is essentially a study in metaphor, and often in the poverty of metaphor. Painters who glibly slapped titles such as "Symphony" or "Fugue" on their canvases were using metaphor on the cheap, borrowing the grandeur or prestige of musical forms to elevate the status of something that had nothing to do with music. When James Whitney, a filmmaker based in California in the 1960s, made an abstract film called "Lapis," he used music of the great Indian sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar. Looking for a visual equivalent, he offered up images that look very much like a Tibetan mandala -- in motion. The metaphorical reach here is small: Iconic Eastern music must look like iconic Eastern art. Imagine if an artist from China decided that the best visual metaphor for Beethoven was a Coca-Cola sign because both are Western.
"Visual Music" is an exhibition about aspiration, about goals that will sound very familiar to people today: breaking down barriers, thinking outside the box, inventing one's way out of dead ends. Man, a creature distinguished from animals essentially by his ability to make metaphor (to make one thing stand for another), reaches for metaphor first when confronted by challenges. Artists, at various points in the last century and a half, have felt themselves hemmed in by their own rules, and so tried to extend their art, metaphorically, into the realm of other art forms. But they were not alone. "Visual Music" is also a study in what might be called the propaganda of the future, the ways in which creative minds -- in this case often with the support of major corporations including IBM -- have struggled to make the new and terrifying more palatable, and perhaps beautiful.
Take, for example, Thomas Wilfred's 1959 "Study in Depth," commissioned by the Clairol Corp. for the lobby of its New York offices. It is a slowly evolving light show that looks like an aurora borealis twisting in space. It could easily be an image from the Hubble telescope. There's an implied metaphorical equivalence: The future is to the sorry moment we live in as this image is to anything you've ever seen in an old-fashioned art gallery. It is more alive, more beautiful, more dynamic. But look behind the screen, to the machine creating it, and you have a metaphor for metaphor itself: The future is made by a set of dinged-up reflective panels, rotating on what looks like an old oil drum. Electrical cords run in and out like tubes into a dying patient. Metaphors that promise much, whether it's a new art form or a new view of science or the world at large, are often just a screen, and it's always worth looking behind them.
I found this article to be rather compelling in thinking about the ways people preceive things in different areas of the world. How would someone from the east explain Beethoven. This idea of placing sound into visuals needs to be rooted in something specific, something scientific and mathamatic. The Chladni patterns are the closest thing to a physical constant at which to measure sounds visual success.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Question
Sounds have predetermined visual forms. Do these forms inform a designer or artist’s choices when creating work to accompany music, or is it simply a subjective creation by the artist or designer.
Abstract
Sound has predetermined visual forms as shown by the Chladny test. When tones and frequencies are put together to form music, I believe a predetermined visual is formed through the repetition of patterns. This form is then manifested through album cover design and musically inspired works of art.
Chladni Pattern
I recently stumbled across a video of a Swiss artist by the name of Nik Schwabe creating Chladni patterns through the use of a bow. I think it would be extremely interesting to have a performer in the space to construct these patterns in a similar manner as people moved through the exhibit.
The Use of Info Graphics
In order to not make the exhibition overly text heavy I could see the use of info graphics becoming increasingly important to allow visitors follow along without having to read a novel written on a wall. Museum fatigue is extremely common and to counteract this it is vitally important to keep the visitor stimulated and also moving along quickly. I've been looking at a few info graphics experts lately and feel I can take a few tips from them.
A few studios that spring to mind are:
PlusMinus
SPVZ
Lamosca
Nicholas Felton
Here are some of the specific examples I have been looking at.
A breakdown of genre types and their similarities could be crucial for visitors understanding what it is being displayed so the use of charts could be important. Also thematic lists could help alleviate any confusion that a patron may have.
A few studios that spring to mind are:
PlusMinus
SPVZ
Lamosca
Nicholas Felton
Here are some of the specific examples I have been looking at.
A breakdown of genre types and their similarities could be crucial for visitors understanding what it is being displayed so the use of charts could be important. Also thematic lists could help alleviate any confusion that a patron may have.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Time To Beef This Thing Up
As you both said in your previous comments it's time to beef this blog up a little bit so here we go. I've been thinking about thesis quite a bit lately but just have not had the time to make any new posts in regards to my thoughts lately. I'd like to start with the deliverable and how I may go about out putting this thesis idea.
As of right now I'm leaning mostly towards designing the final deliverable as an exhibition. I feel that if people were able to view the final product as an exhibition it could be quite interesting and would allow for a more complete understanding of the project. Essentially displaying all elements of the process and working people through my thought process.
Upon entering the exhibition they would be faced with a synopsis of the project. I imagine this being quite text heavy and adhered to a wall as a vinyl decal similar to the opening of the type show that just took place at 52 McCaul St. the other day.
A demonstration of the Chladny test would then take place either physically in the gallery space or through video projection. The exhibit would then follow a path through record cover history based on genre. The exhibit would be broken up in a colour coded manner distinguishing certain genre types from one another and allowing for a large overview of each genre and it's similarities. Headphones would hang on the wall to allow visitors to experience the music while viewing the cover art.
The exhibition would then flow into primary examples of how the Chladny test effects certain musical genres by determining the average tone within a given piece of music and then displaying that pattern on the wall.
There would be a program book to accompany the exhibit, to allow for patrons to understand this exhibit further as they continue return home.
I envision this exhibition being placed in a larger space than a typical gallery, this would be something that would be housed in a place like MOCCA or the AGO as a large scale instillation.
Here are a few sources of inspiration I've uncovered in my past few weeks of thinking about thesis.
As of right now I'm leaning mostly towards designing the final deliverable as an exhibition. I feel that if people were able to view the final product as an exhibition it could be quite interesting and would allow for a more complete understanding of the project. Essentially displaying all elements of the process and working people through my thought process.
Upon entering the exhibition they would be faced with a synopsis of the project. I imagine this being quite text heavy and adhered to a wall as a vinyl decal similar to the opening of the type show that just took place at 52 McCaul St. the other day.
A demonstration of the Chladny test would then take place either physically in the gallery space or through video projection. The exhibit would then follow a path through record cover history based on genre. The exhibit would be broken up in a colour coded manner distinguishing certain genre types from one another and allowing for a large overview of each genre and it's similarities. Headphones would hang on the wall to allow visitors to experience the music while viewing the cover art.
The exhibition would then flow into primary examples of how the Chladny test effects certain musical genres by determining the average tone within a given piece of music and then displaying that pattern on the wall.
There would be a program book to accompany the exhibit, to allow for patrons to understand this exhibit further as they continue return home.
I envision this exhibition being placed in a larger space than a typical gallery, this would be something that would be housed in a place like MOCCA or the AGO as a large scale instillation.
Here are a few sources of inspiration I've uncovered in my past few weeks of thinking about thesis.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)