Visual Music

Computer Baroque - curated by Richard Wright. online exhibition from 14 April to 14 July 2009 "Animate Projects presents Computer Baroque, an online exhibition, curated by Richard Wright. Computer Baroque is a selection of defining works in the history of artists’ digital moving image. Rarely seen, they represent a period – the late eighties and early nineties - in which computer animation was the focus for the most audacious and exuberant experiments across all areas of new media, art and technology... The Computer Baroque programme screened at Tate Modern on 20 March 2009; the majority of those works are now showing here from 14 April to 14 July 2009. Programme notes by curator Richard Wright." See: http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_project/computer_b…

No figuration, only dots and lines as ends in themselves. The "most abstract" festival in the world posses a creative challenge to study and reflect upon the essence of form and movement. Mad-Actions and The iotaCenter present "PUNTO Y RAYA 2009" "The "most abstract festival in the world" launches its new call for entries open to short·films exploring the creative possibilites of the dot and the line. No figuration, no perspective, just dots and lines as ends in themselves! An amazing challenge to study and reflect upon the essence of form and movement. Can you take it? No entry fee and the deadline is Monday August 17th, 2009." Check out the website for more information and online entry form: http://www.puntoyrayafestival.com/en…

Activating the Space of Reception "Featuring lectures, discussions, performances, projections and installations, this major international conference presents a critical appraisal of an expanding field of film and video art from multi-screen, immersive, performance-based live-projections through to interactive, digital and virtual reality multi-media events."... "Works identified as Expanded Cinema often open up questions surrounding the spectator's construction of time/space relations, activating the spaces of cinema and narrative as well as other contexts of media reception. In doing so it offers an alternative and challenging perspective on filmmaking, visual arts practices and the narratives of social space, everyday life and cultural communicatio…

Visible Music Composing visions of sound by UK composer Jim Aitchison. "Jim Aitchison is a composer whose music derives from a range of sources, often from the world of the visual, re-imagining contemporary and past artworks as notations of sound. He makes music for chamber ensembles, orchestra and solo performers out of encounters with visual art and living artists, curators and galleries. The work is proposed both as a response to these encounters and as part of a wider engagement with fundamental musical and artistic issues." His responses to art/paintings in a musical context are quite extraordinary. The scores resemble the visual - as in the screenshot when you come to his website initially, here a painting entitled Elegy for Terry Frost by John Hyland …

Richard Baily's incredible images and animations are in quicktime video format on the webstie Image Savant. The colours and forms that he has created are incredible. Richard provided animations for several hollywood films and sadly died in 2006. Many of his images can be seen on the http://www.imagesavant.com/ website. Link to page with video clips: http://www.imagesavant.com/QT.html The center for Visual Music provide an excellent memoriam to him and his work http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Baily.htm

Article: Say it with Pictures by Dennis H. Miller for Electronic Musician Sep 1, 2008 Really informative article by Dennis H. Miller on tools (several free) that can convert images to sound and one that converts sound to images.  Written by Miller for Electronic Musician. See:  http://emusician.com/software/say-with-pictures/index.html

A Tate Modern exhibition in London, is holding a Rodchenko and Popova music event (Sat 9, May, 2009) "Composers such as Dmitri Shostakovitch , Nikolai Roslavets and Arthur Lourie gave muscial expression to many of the themes" that the Russion painters Rodchenko and Popova explored in their paintings. " Liubov Popova (1889-1924) and Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) were pivotal figures in the debates and discussions that defined Constructivism.   ... "The Constructivists compared the artist to an engineer, arranging materials scientifically and objectively, and producing art works as rationally as any other manufactured object... There was already a distinct strain of utopianism in the Russian avant-garde – a determination to reinvent art, as if f…

DANCING WITH MATHEMATICA - PART OF THE CAMBRIDGE SCIENCE FESTIVAL Music, generated in Mathematica, by composer Katarina Miljkovic; chereograhy by Dawn Kramer; video projections by Stephen Buck; performance by Dawn Kramer and Brian McCook. Event at Cambridge Science Festival - Boston US Dancing with Mathematica - The Broad Institute, 7 Cambridge Center - 26th April 2009 Dancing with Mathematica is a journey through complexity in movement, bady projection and sound. Music and choreography are structured on four classes of complexity, proposed by Stephen Wolfram A New Kind of Science. While music develops by evolution of cellular automata, from simple to universally complex, choreography reflects on the nature of choice, questions the concept of self as a dolid, separate…

The MFA Computer Art Department at School of Visual Arts, the New York Digital Salon and the Department of Music and Multimedia Studies at Northeastern University presented the New York premiere of the Visual Music Marathon. The screenings of the 120 visual music works took place in the new Chelsea Visual Arts Theatre, recently acquired by the School of Visual Arts, New York. The theatre was an excellent venue for the screening of the works.   The schedule for the event and the program catalog can be downloaded from: http://www.2009vmm.neu.edu/schedule.html I was fortunate to have also attended the Boston premiere of the Visual Music Marathon held in 2007, hence many of the wonderful works on show I had seen before and had become familiar with since.  After the fir…