This is a collection of interesting links . They are a mixture of other artist’s sites, various kinds of information about sound and light, and experimental work with film, video, and combined media. Some of them may no longer work...
Some are repeated to fit into the awkward categories. It’s a entirely idiosyncratic selection, but all lists are ultimately incomplete, and all categories arbitrary. But if you think I should add something to this one, take something out, or change it, please email me.
To open a new frame-page for these links click here
Clinical synaesthesia is properly defined as: “ when stimulation of one sensory modality automatically triggers a perception in a second modality, in the absence of any direct stimulation of this second modality.” (Baron-Cohen, Simon and John E Harrison, eds. (1997) Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings Blackwell, Oxford). To put that in lay language, it means hearing colours, seeing sounds etc. Some people have this ability; other people may experience it temporarily as a result of hallucinations accidentally or deliberately induced.
The idea of synaesthesia has been an important influence on experimental film and early animation. Some artists and musicians, like Kandinsky and Scriabin, thought synaesthesia indicated a suprasensory spiritual realm. But research suggests that the synaesthete’s experiences, though personally consistent, are socially arbitrary. It seems there is no universal colour-sound correspondence. Despite this, the idea of synaesthesia is realised in material form by multimedia technologies, through which different sensory experiences (usually light, sound and colour) can be made to correspond.
Theremin Vox - A Brief History of Synaesthesia
Leonardo Bibliographies: Synesthesia in Art
Artificial Synesthesia for Synthetic Vision
A Research Paper on Synaesthesia
Synaesthesia - A cognitive model.
Influenced by ideas of synaesthesia, early experimental film was characterized by attempts to create ‘visual music’. There is an interesting connection between European modernism and Californian counter-culture as the late William Moritz writes here. Abstract film pioneers like Oskar Fischinger emigrated to California and were influential in the growth of light shows and other pioneering forms of ‘expanded cinema’. All the ‘light pianos’ and ‘colour harmoniums’ seem to anticipate the audiovisual keyboard interface used in everyday computer applications, as well as prefiguring the synthesized synaesthesia of beat-matching VJ culture.
Center for Visual Music - Store
RhythmicLight.com Bibliography
The Dream of Color Music, And Machines That Made Them – essay by the late, great William Moritz
A Brief History of Synaesthesia - article on the Theremin Vox website
Thomas Wilfred – light organ pioneer
The Italian Futurists pioneered the idea of ‘chromatic music’ as a new kind of cinema:
Abstract Cinema--Chromatic Music
Abstract Cinema And Light-Music
Abstract Cinema_Chromatic Music
391: abstract cinema by Bruno Corra
John Whitney searched for harmonic correspondences between light and sound. Some of his films look a bit dated in the era of screensavers, but that’s because he was one of the first to move from film into computer graphics. He built an extraordinary machine to generate synthetic light and sound, made out of old machine gun parts.
Sons & Lumiéres: show at Centre Pompidou
This list could be much, much longer. If you have suggestions email me.
The Film Strip Tells All: direct animation techniques
A Len Lye Quicktime clip at the Re-voir site
What can non-pictorial light imagery tell us about the world, or ourselves? Is it moving wallpaper, screensaver eye-candy? Len Lye thought his images could be a visualization of his inner cell structure, Stan Brakhage called his films “moving visual thinking”, and Gilles Deleuze believed the development of cinema (narrative & non-narrative) was the development of human thought itself.
Light Moving in Time: William Wees’ book in its entirety online
The Psychedelic Review Archives 1963-1971
Post from usenet archive: Re: Ancient hidden ...
LILA -> Trance States and Metaphor Generation
In the late 1920s Heinrich Klüver researched the consistencies in hallucinated pattern imagery from subjects who had ingested mescalin. He proposed that these entoptic phenomena which he called ‘Form Constants’ might contain information about the neural operation of vision. Over eighty years later, a group of mathematicians suggested that the patterns allowed accurate mapping of the part of the brain concerned with vision:
math: University of Utah News Release: Januar...
also-
Peter Kubelka - there are no moving images! discuss...essay on Peter Kubelka’s ‘metric films’
The idea of Expanded Cinema can be seen as a forerunner to all the combined media event and performance forms that we now have in dance, VJing, etc, etc.
Expanded Cinema: download the influential book from 1970 by Gene Youngblood (pdf file)
Jordan Belson filmmaker responsible for the groundbreaking Vortex concerts combining film and music
Stan VanderBeek on the Electronic Arts Intermix site
An overview of Shoot Shoot Shoot - event replaying '70s experimental UK films
The FilmAktion Group (Tate Gallery info)
This list refers specifically to people using film for live performance. This list could be much, much longer. If you have suggestions email me.
Metamkine – great French trio who perform with audio tape and 16mm film
David Leister’s Kino Club – innovative London-based experimental film person
My definition of sonimage is when sound and image are not just simultaneously linked, but causally related: what the semioticians would call an indexical sign. Dials, LED meters, onscreen soundwaves, Oscilloscopes, etc are all means of trying to visualise this ungraspable sonic ‘thing’ which is essentially not an object, but a movement.
Film:
Film uses an optical soundtrack, which means that image and sound are produced by similar means: projected light. (link to info on Motion Picture Sound) An ‘exciter’ lamp shines through a soundtrack running alongside the image track, onto a light sensitive photoelectric cell which produces a variable electrical current according to the occlusion of the light. Sidelined by silicon chip technology, this was once seen as the future of audio synthesis, allowing direct visual composition of electronic sound. Lazlo Moholy-Nagy made a film called
Artists like Norman McLaren, and Barry Spinello compiled complex visual systems for generating specific kinds of sound. John Whitney invented a machine for translation
There’s a chapter on ‘Animated Sound’ in Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology by Robert Russett and Cecile Starr. A very useful book.
The Official John Whitney Sr. Site
Guy Sherwin's Newsprint films (from luxonline website)
Tate Gallery info on Farrer, Rhodes, Sherwin
Video:
Video and sound are both generated from an electronic signal. Some artists have exploited this to make integrated audiovisual works.
Carsten Nicolai’s “telefunken” uses sound from CD as a direct a/v output
More on telefunken
More on Carsten Nicolai
Gert-Jan Prins’ fm-modulations tv
Other related ideas:
Sound Visualization and Analysis
The Queen of the South : a video of Alvin Lucier’s composition using sound to vibrate canvas.
Lucier was influenced by a book by:
Hans Jenny, who was influenced by experiments in vibration visualization by:
Chladni patterns for violin plates
Sympathetic Vibratory Physics - John W. Keely...
Animation World Network – absolutely essential, comprehensive resource for animation, past and present
welcome to the official people like us website
Egon March Institute - Desktop Cinema
VJ culture is a form of expanded cinema. Its also Expanded TV, Expanded Internet, Expanded Videogames etc. Undoubtedly club visuals are a direct descendant of the underground club projections by people like Mark Boyle or events like Jordan Belson’s Vortex concerts, although it also owes a lot to the development of MTV and pop promo videos, too, and of course the direct analogy of the DJ extending the breaks, and cutting to the beat. These sites have lots more links, and information about VJ tools, software, and events. People have put really hard work into them:
VJ Culture - an essay
Image/ine (now ImX) innovative software from Tom Demeyer, formerly of:
STEIM important gestural interface research institute for artists. Tom Demeyer is now at
Waag Society, developing more interesting softwares,and other things
ARKAOS - Pioneers in video jockeying technology
TroikaTronix – home of Isadora, software designed for interactive dance performance
Software for Dancers: Isadora Article/ Part II
Camart - VJamm – VJamm pioneered real-time audiovisual scratching in the manner of the DJ. Used by Coldcut
DACS Audio – UK software suppliers
Vidvox - Interactive Digital Video – company developed by Johnny DeKam, creator of VDMX. Grid2 is a good, simple, intuitive scratch’n’scrub software at a very sane price
The SuperCollider Home Page free, tough-to-learn software
Experimental Television Center
The Early Video Project: essential archive of video information
POST VIDEO ART | Video Art & Experimental Film
Video Data Bank: Video Art and Video Artists
http://www.eai.org/eai/tape.jsp
British Artists Film and Video Study Collection
The AHRB Centre for British Film and Television
Press clippings of early UK video art on Steve Partridges site
The Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual Culture at Roehampton University, UK
Golan Levin's multimedia projection performances
The Live Experimental Video mailing list (LEV) archives
Video Synthesizers Homage Page
Panasonic WJ-MX12 Review - VJCentral.com
AudioVisualizers.com Kits, Books, & Videos fo...
LabGuy's World: The History of Video Tape Recorders: a brilliant site for old videotech fans
The History of Video Recorders
The History of Video on Demand
Museum of Early Editing Equipment and Techniques
A history of video conferencing
Feedback was one of the earliest forms of “image-processed” video. Nam June Paik used it, and Skip Sweeney researched it. It appeared in the Queen Bohemian Rhapsody video and is now emulated in screensaver software like the one on iTunes.
Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback - James Crutchfields canonical essay reprinted on the Ars Electronica website
Pixel feedback fractals on the Technology Research News website
The Ultimate Video Feedback Page – links to other feedback people, & images to accompany the Crutchfield essay
Robert Haller Publications includes essays on Stan Brakhage, and avant-garde film
Avanto Helsinki Media Art Festival 2002
Program Details for Resemblage
COMM 328 Underground Film Links
filmvideo.at: exhaustive Austrian film database
Brakhage’s Silent Legacy for Sound Cinema
chicagomediaworks.com - Eisenstein's Film Essay
Avant-garde, Underground, and Experimental Cinema
24framespersecond.com: Writings to Films
Cinema and Technology Conference - Institute
COMM 328 Underground Film Links
‘Media Art’ is a bit of a horrible term. What kind of art doesn’t use a medium of some kind? However, there are some interesting opinions on these pages, from the technophiliacs to the technosceptics, and some people in between.
The Buckminster Fuller Institute
The Daniel Langlois Foundation – important organization for fostering Sci-Art research
CRUMB – organization devoted to curating art in new media
Media Art Net – a history of art in electronic media
essay in Art Monthly by Michael Gibbs on exhibiting art in 'new media'
Digital Art Museum - Technology timeline
techno.seduction: essays: Roy Ascott
Understanding Media – Marshall Mcluhan – remind me again – what is the medium?
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction – Walter Benjamin’s essay from 1936 –still vital. I’m sure whose translation this is..? There’s another, and much more here at:
marxists.org – outstanding philosophy archive
The Californian Ideology - another technosceptical view from the media research group at University of Westminster
Literature on Entropy and Inequality
interesting lecture on telepresence and interfaces
Mediamatic: Kim Cascone: The Aesthetics of Failure
Deleuze on Flows (from Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze)
Kinoeye | European film | Vol 4.03, 26 July 2004
Leonardo On-Line: Art, Science and Technology
The Sound Projector Music Magazine
Expanded Cinema : download the influential book from 1970 by Gene Youngblood (pdf file)
Light Moving in Time: William Wees’ great out-of-print book in its entirety online
Ars Electronica essay archive for festival publications
Eisenstein and Sound – Douglas Kahn essay
New Music Box - essays on new and experimental music
Steven P. McGreevy's ELF-VLF recordings of atmospherics
Quake: Listening to Earthquakes
Earthear – environmental sound info and links
Reaktions - Composers - Spoombung
European Free Improvisation home