Tate Modern has unveiled the twelfth commission in The Unilever Series by the artist Tacita Dean. Entitled FILM, the work is an eleven-minute silent 35mm looped film projected onto a monolith standing...
MICROSCOPE Gallery is honored to present the gallery debut of independent filmmaker Su Friedrich. With works spanning 37 years, "re:working" offers a first look at the hidden influences and art of Friedrich’s...
Noches eléctricas [Electric Nights] takes its name from Les nuits électriques, a short film directed by Eugene Deslaw in 1928, in which he focused on city lights at nighttime, sequencing street lamps,...
Contour vzw is pleased to announce that Anthony Kiendl has been appointed curator for the 2011 Contour Biennial. Kiendl is the Director of Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, Canada.
On Thursday September 17 at 6.00pm Careof DOCVA, presents "Quando l'occhio trema: il flicker tra cinema, video e digitale" (When the eye flickers: the flicker technique in cinema, video and digital), videoscreening...
On Tuesday the 15th of December 2009 Digimag presents DATA, the third meeting of the Sincronie Festival of 2009. The event will be directed by Marco Mancuso from Digicult, and will take place from 7.30...
Curated by Macu Morán, the Indomitable Women exhibition gathers a selection of audiovisual artworks developed within the past four decades, in an attempt to glimpse the ethereal something that is a backdrop...
Plateaux Festival is a unique event on a worldwide scale and can be compared with such undertakings as German Transmediale or Austrian Ars Electronica.
Computer Baroque is an online exhibition at Animate Project webiste, a selection of defining works in the history of artists’ digital moving image. Rarely seen, they represent a period – the...
Tonewheels is an experiment in converting graphical imagery to sound,
inspired by some of the pioneering 20th Century electronic music
inventions. Transparent tonewheels with repeating patterns are spun over
light-sensitive electronic circuitry to produce sound. This all-analog
set is performed entirely live without the use of computers, using only
overhead projectors as light source, performance interface and audience
display. In this way, Tonewheels aims to open up the "black box" of
electronic music and video by exposing the working processes of the
performance for the audience to see.
Up until now, Tonewheels has been realized as a live performance or a
workshop (at WAVES, Dortmund, May 2008). However, for Access Space,
Holzer has decided to create a playable installation based on these
simple optoelectronic principles. Users of Access Space will be invited
to produce patterns for the spinning tonewheels as well as graphical
scores to be projected on the instrument in order to play it.
The inspiration for this installation comes from the ANS synthesizer.
The ANS is a pioneering electronic music instrument conceived and built
by Evgeny Murzin in the Soviet Union during the late 1950's. It is also
one of the first experiments in direct graphical composition. To compose
with the ANS, the user scratches lines through the opaque black covering
on a glass plate. Light shines through these lines as the plate passes
through the machine, and activates photocells inside it. Lines at the
bottom of the plate produce low tones, while lines at the top of the
plate produce high tones.
The only existing ANS is installed in the Theremin Center in Moscow.
Soviet composers such as Edward Artemyev used the ANS to record the
soundtracks for Tarkovsky's "Stalker" and "Solaris", and more recently
the English group Coil released a triple CD realized on the instrument.
Outside Moscow, the legacy of the ANS lives on largely in the software
world. Any kind of software which allows the user to "draw" or "paint" with sound, such as the UPIC softwares developed by Iannis Xenakis at
IRCAM, IanniX, HighC or the MetaSynth software, owes a great deal to the
ANS.
The completed Tonewheels instrument (housed in a beautiful old wooden
Grandfather Clock cabinet) as well as the user-designed wheels and
scores will be presented on Friday, 1 August 2008 at Access Space, 1
Sidney Street, Sheffield UK.
