Tony Brooks Towards New Multisensory Spaces and Environments

Four Senses Concert, 2002

This important concert that took place in 2002 in the Dorothy Winstone Theatre, Auckland, New Zealand.  The four senses concert were a collaboration between Raewyn Turner (NZ) and Tony Brooks (UK).

website: link

"The ‘Four Senses’ 1999, 2002 concerts were to engage and reframe perception of music and to play with subjective experiences and simulated synesthesia. Each sensory element was constructed from information relating to the other elements. The associations and correspondences of the elements made by the audience was according to their own individual and personal experiences.
The investigations include perception, misinterpretation, fictional translations and the sensory worlds of the blind/deaf: of hearing, of breathing in, and of visualizing music.

Tony Brooks utilised sensors, software and projectors to create an interactive system capturing movement from the orchestra and translating it into painting with coloured light. In this way the orchestra conductor was able to “paint” the scene through his gestures within an interactive space. Similarly orchestra members, dancers and a special signing choir for the deaf images were blended into the backdrop in real-time such that their velocity of movement affected the color of image generation and collage composition.
Raewyn Turner interpreted the sound to colour and smell using the correspondences that she made between sound/silence and light/dark. The translations involved intuitive drawing, charts, measurements, referral to the seasonal time of harvest of aromatic plants, and an equation which produces a selection of plants from which to choose smell pitch.

The performances were an improvisation and a real - time translation of sound and the gestures of making that sound, into light and colour, and multiple layers of smell. The light collage thus created was a play of interaction between live video feeds and sensors, and coloured light pre-programmed to an interpretation of sound, each affecting the other in a dynamic visual loop. "

Source: Link to more information and where you can download media files

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Fast Forward: Conversations with Machines

Fast Forward: Conversations with machines

From camera obscura to cybernetics: filmmaker Joost Rekveld outlines experimental cinema from its hidden past to a distant future.

By Joost Rekveld

Essay

Quote from essay
"In this essay I want to develop my thoughts about possible futures for what is now referred to as experimental cinema, inspired by some of the ideas behind expanded cinema. Experimental cinema is a marginal cinema, not in the sense that its purpose is to remain obscure forever, but in the sense that those filmmakers are called experimental who challenge the categories of mainstream cinema. These same artists often cross over from or into other disciplines, so in order not to lose ourselves in speculations concerning the future of everything, we will have to rewind until we find a starting point from which we can can try and extrapolate. "

View online at:
http://preview.instantcinema.org/essays/852/Fast-Forward-Conversations-with-machines

Joost Rekveld website: http://www.lumen.nu/rekveld/wp/index.php

'Raumlichtmusik' - Early 20th Century Abstract Cinema Immersive Environments.

"'Raumlichtmusik' - Early 20th Century Abstract Cinema Immersive Environments."
Essay by Cindy Keefer (Director Center for Visual Music)

"Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Creative Data Special Issue. Leonardo: The International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, and MIT Press. October 2009."

This is an important historical visual music essay on Oskar Fischinger and Jordan Belson's early experiments in creating abstract cinema for immersive projection environments. It traces the origins in their work of what is more common today - the immersive multimedia environment. Information about plans Fischinger had to present a multimedia performance for the Farblichtmusik shows (started by László) has been researched and documented in this essay and is very exciting information to check out for the scholar interested in accurately tracing the origins of visual music and in particular, its links to contemporary multimedia performance. The vortex concerts, are discussed in detail. These concerts are important to check out for both historical visual music but also in relation to tracing the origins of using projected visuals alongside electronic music, which is so common today, in relation to video projection with electroacoustic music. This article traces these connections and provides an introduction to its history. Do go and read.

Abstract

"Filmmakers Oskar Fischinger and Jordan Belson created cinematic multimedia experiments from 1926 to 1959; three of these events are predecessors to immersive environments: (A) Beginning in 1926, Fischinger's multiple projector shows combining abstract films, colored light projections, and painted slides; (B) Fischinger's 1944 (unrealized) concept for a dome theatre with center film projectors filling the sphere, creating "endless space without perspective" and (c) Belson and Henry Jacobs’ 1950s Vortex Concerts at Morrison Planetarium, utilizing multiple projectors and 38 speakers, with
“no separation of audience and stage or screen; the entire domed area becomes a living theater of sound and light."

Article can be read online at:
http://www.leonardo.info/LEA/CreativeData/CD_Keefer.pdf

Visit CVM Library Page for more resources in relation to visual music.
http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Library.html

Filter - Issue 66 - Synchresis

Filter Magazine Issue 66 / Synchresis
Explored:
Australian Sound Artists working at the spontaneous weld between sounds and image.
December 2007.

http://filter.anat.org.au/category/issue-66/

Articles:
Monster and Maps by Mitchell Whitelaw

Synchresis DVD

"The Synchresis DVD, curated by Mitchell Whitelaw brought together ten Australian sound artists:
Gordon Monro,
Wade Marynowsky,
Peter Newman,
Jean Poole,
BotBorg,
Julian Oliver & Steven Pickles,
Robin Fox,
Andrew Gadow and
Abject Leader.

3000 copies were circulated in Filter Issue 66 nationally and internationally and the DVD was launched at the Chauvel Cinema Sydney with live performances by Robin Fox, Peter Newman and Ian Andrews."
http://www.anat.org.au/2010/06/synchresis/

Synchresis DVD vimeo channel

The Synchresis DVD works can be seen on ANAT’s Vimeo Channel.
http://www.vimeo.com/anat/videos

Example highlighted here: - PRINCIPLE 4 (excerpt) by Botborg


ANAT, Filter Issue 66 Synchresis, 2007 - PRINCIPLE 4 (excerpt) by Botborg from ANAT on Vimeo.

Filter
"First published as the ANAT (Australian Network for Art and Technology) Bulletin in July 1988, Filter has been informing and inspiring a global network of artists, designers, curators, researchers, writers, educators and creative and research organisations for over two decades. Each issue thematically investigates an area of emerging practice or art form of the future; exploring the new creativities which are occurring across community, culture and industry."
http://filter.anat.org.au/about-filter/

Schematic as Score by Derek Holzer

Vague Terrain 19: Schematic as Score: Uses and Abuses of the (In)Deterministic Possibilities of Sound Technology.

Interesting article on synthesising images and sound and looking back to electronic video and music pioneers to provide a context for more informed contemporary work that synthesise video and sound.

View article: http://vagueterrain.net/journal19

Space Light Art - by Cindy Keefer

"Space Light Art" - Early Abstract Cinema and Multimedia, 1900-1959 by Cindy Keefer

Article online at: http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/CKSLAexc.htm