Digital art – Who cares?
Posted on: September 2, 2016
- In: Art | Media art | Software | Videos
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Found on ArtTube.nl: a very interesting documentary (in Dutch, but with English subtitles) about the issues of preserving digital and software driven art works over time.
As these art works are software or make use of software, they age very fast because computers, storage media, operating systems and programming languages develop rapidly. This poses a challenge for museums who buy these art works. The documentary illustrates this problem by discussing the preservation of works of artist Peter Struycken, the Dutch pioneer of 20th century digital art, whose works have been acquired by most Dutch contemporary art museums. An excellent opportunity to get acquainted with this important Dutch artist and some of these Dutch art museums:
More info:
- ArtTube.nl
- Peter Struycken website
- In: Art | Experience | Installations | Media art | Sound art | Technology art | Videos
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Found today while browsing on YouTube: a video of the Parallels installation of Nonotak Studio, one of the highlights of the STRP Festival 2015 edition:
Nonotak Studio is a collaboration between illustrator Noemi Schipfer and architect musician Takami Nakamoto. Nonotak was created in late 2011.
In early 2013, they started to work on light and sound installations, capitalizing on Takami Nakamoto’s approach of space & sound, and Noemi Schipfer’s experience in kinetic visual design.
Parallels is an audio visual installation that was commissioned by the STRP festival. It explores interactions between light, space and people within the room of the installation. The boundaries and notion of space, become abstract as the audience crosses the room, but in doing so, the audience also affects the space by breaking the light. This installation is strongly connected to the space in which it takes place; it lives within it. But as soon as the light hits the walls that define the space, it reaches its limits and stops reproducing itself.
More info:
- In: Art | Installations | Noise boxes | Performance | Sampling | Sound art | Technology art
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Soft Revolvers is an audiovisual performance by Canadian artist Myriam Bleau. She explores the limits between musical performance and digital arts, creating audiovisual systems that go beyond the screen and integrate hip hop, techno and pop elements.
For Soft Revolver she makes use of 4 spinning tops built with clear acrylic by the artist. Each top is associated with an ‘instrument’ in an electronic music composition and the motion data collected by sensors – placed inside the tops – informs musical algorithms:
With their large circular spinning bodies and their role as music playing devices, the interfaces evoke turntables and DJ culture, hip hop and dance music. LEDs placed inside the tops illuminate the body of the objects in a precise counterpoint to the music, creating stunning spinning halos:
Soft Revolvers was performed during the LEV Festival in Gijon in April and can also be seen at the upcoming Sonar festival in Barcelona at the end of this week.
More information:
- Myriam Bleau website
- Myriam Bleau spins Soft Revolvers in MusicWorks magazine
A new laser-and-sound installation by Robert Henke a.k.a. Monolake: Fall.
Fall has apparently been inspired by the drowned Bavarian village Fall, as can be read on Robert’s website:
“In the 1950s the village of Fall in the south of Bavaria slowly disappeared under the rising waters of the newly built Sylvenstein water reservoir. In 2015 the reservoir had extremely low water. Ruins of the old village became visible again; remains of walls forming broken grid-like structures, usually submerged below the water surface. These images became the inspiration for this installation.”
It was premiered at the LEV Festival in Gijon, Spain in April. In his tech blog, Robert Henke explains how it was done.
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- In: Instruments | Noise boxes | Sound art | Synthesizers
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Nowadays lots of media artists, musicians and music software and hardware products are dedicated to translating visuals into sounds and vice versa. One of the pioneers in this area of “visual sound” was a British electronic composer called Daphne Oram. She was one of the founders of the famous BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958. But after hearing Poème électronique of Edgar Varese at the Brussels World’s Fair, she decided to leave the BBC and start her own electronic music studio a year later, the Oramics Studios for Electronic Composition. In this studio, she made one of the first synthesizers and quite likely the first audiovisual synthesizer in the beginning of the 1960s: the Oramics Machine.
With this (of course) analogue and largely mechanical machine, she drew shapes and waveforms onto a synchronised set of ten 35mm film strips which overlayed a series of photo-electric cells. These cells in turn generated electrical charges to control amplitude, timbre, frequency and duration of sounds generated by oscillators. This audiovisual way of music composition was called “Oramics” by Daphne Oram:
Daphne Oram died in 2003 at the age of 77 and oramics and the Oramic Machine were forgotten. But in 2011 the Oramics Machine has been salvaged and now is part of the collection of the Science Museum in London. The videos below document the rescue of this pioneering synthesizer by the Science Museum and explain some of the groundbreaking audiovisual concepts behind it:
More information
- DaphneOram.org – website dedicated to preservation of the Daphne Oram collection
- Article The Story Of Daphne Oram’s Optical Synthesizer in SoundOnSound magazine
- Daphne Oram biography on Wikipedia
- Oramics music composition explained on Wikipedia
- The story of the Oramics Machine in Resident Advisor magazine
nnnoises.com 