Aug 10, 2019
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Playing around with After effects to create some John Whitney like short videos. #art #aftereffects #johnwhitney #artist #digitalart (at Southern Illinois University Carbondale) https://www.instagram.com/p/BoxRt4IgPia/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=y0rak5biy4h
Inspiration of the day #earlygeometricart #johnwhitney
Sun in Venus song x Whitney brothers (matrix III, 1972) #ableton #abletonlive #animation #johnwhitney #filmart
Giving shape to time
“Music, as the true model of temporal structure, is most worthy of study among prior arts. Music is the supreme example of movement become pattern. Music is time given sublime shape. If for no other reason than its universality and its status in the collective mind, music invites imitation. A visual art should give the same superior shape to the temporal order that we expect of music. As with the twenty-six elements of the alphabet, music’s hierarchal pattern of tones provide the model for a visual art with which to “make infinite use of finite means” to construct “architecture.”
The Raft of the Medusa by Theodore Géricault
What is the nature and function of motion in all art? What are the relations of motion and emotion?
“A painting, regardless of implicit dynamics, still exists passively fixed in time. But a new art might pattern action in time with all elements in motion at all times. The graphic problem, then, will be how to manipulate a field of visual elements so that all parts will contribute purposely to some temporal (time-structured) design.” (Whitney, 1980:37)
Whitney, John. Digital Harmony: On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art. 1980, Pg. 44-45
Processing
// Transcription of program arabesque // originally prepared by Paul Rother for John Whitney for the book "Digital Harmony" // ported to the Processing language by Jim Bumgardner
Processing code here: http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/1270
The fundamental idea in this animation is one of the elements in Whitney's 1975 film "Arabesque."
Works by John Whitney (titles in Vertigo by Saul Bass).
Whitney’s work appeals to me because it goes beyond a direct graphical representation of sound. It attempts to translate the concept of sound to visual images (sonic harmony and visual harmony), and therefore (in my view) succeeds in creating visuals that feel like they sound.
As pointed out in Mick Grierson’s lecture (previous post), most graphical representations of sound visualize the sound’s waveform – however, how the ears perceive waveforms is completely different from how the eyes perceive waveforms. Therefore, this kind of a translation is not what I’m after. I am looking for ways the feel (texture, timbre?) of acoustic space can be used in visual space.
John Whitney - Digital Harmony
Book: Digital Harmony: On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art (1980), John Whitney (Link to PDF)
Color - pitch relationships
Color organs
Kandinsky (synaesthesia; painted what he heard)
Scriabin
Leon Theremin
The exploration of the relationship between pitch and color has inspired a lot of audiovisual artists today.
Isaac Newton made a graph trying to relate color and pitch, and realized that the math didn’t work out – it was an entirely different waveform space. There’s no relationship between how the eye responds to waveforms and how the ear responds to sound.
iScientist experiment:
Beau Lotto argued that there was a relationship between color and pitch.
Data collected in an experiment including 250 participants revealed that there was no relationship.
One correlation found: between brightness (luminance) of an image and frequency of a sound.
Lower frequency = lower luminance
Higher frequency = higher luminance
John Whitney
No relationship between pitches and any other static discrete visual elements in that way.
If we’re going to do an audiovisual composition - it’s not a piano (ie. here’s a note, here’s an image).
Pitch is not relevant
Frequency ‘relationships’/ratios are relevant.
How the nature of periodocity impacted on our audiovisual experience.
--> Explored through visual motion pattern.
Whitney’s geometry
The Roses of Grandii
Euclidean geometry
Used as a parallel to the sonic harmonic series
“Visual harmonics”
Motion pattern harmonics
Take a shape, extend it to a line of shapes, rotate each one by a factor of its distance from the center.
--> Harmonic relationships in visual motion pattern.
Polar patterns exhibit similar behaviour
Instead of Cartesian Coordinates we use Polar Coordinates (amplitude and phase), a different way of thinking about the same space.
Used to explore more complex ‘multidimensional harmonics’; the patterns are far more complex.
SYMMETRY and HARMONY; complementary to sound & music. A visual process which is similar to the sound process.
Whitney was never able to directly link visual harmonics with sonic harmonics.
Mick Grierson
Made an Audiovisual Synthesizer – a visual synthesizer that uses the concept of harmonics in order to build a set of painting algorithms.
Creating something that “sounds like it looks” – is it doing the same thing?
Abstraction – the meaning of abstraction – is there a meaning?
Texture
Texture - timbre
Complex dynamics within an image
Texture as a tactile aspect of music
Texture in terms of periodicity - how things operate over time.
Time across space
Audiovisual composition
Both sound & image are treated in the same way and at the same time
The primary material is the audiovisual texture itself. Neither exists without the other. No form difference between the two.
Watch lecture here:
Other links:
http://www.theergocollective.com/?p=919