COLOR ORGAN
ABSTRACT IMAGERY PARALLEL TO MUSIC
APPLICATION OF ACOUSTICAL LAWS TO OPTICAL EXPRESSION

"Fischinger´s attitude towards music could be held as somewhat ambiguous but according to Moritz he did not regard his films as musical visualizations. He held the abstract imagery to contain qualities parallel to the ones found in music, and the actual soundtrack used as means to attract the attention of the audience to recognize this (Moritz 1974:50). The audience, then as now, were more inclined to accept music as "abstract" artform than they were towards painting, where the question; "what does this represent?" is bound to appear. Fischinger saw himself as an abstract expressionist but in contrast to fellow artists such as Jackson Pollock, he constantly searched for visual harmony in his art." LINK

"The flood of feeling created through music intensified the feeling and effectiveness of this graphic cinematic expression, and helped to make understandable the absolute film. Under the guidance of music, which was already highly developed there came the speedy discovery of new laws - the application of acoustical laws to optical expression was possible."

"As in the dance, new motions and rhythms sprang out of the music - and the rhythms became more and more important. ---Oskar Fischinger
Etudes, Optical Poem (1938) to music of Second Hungarian Rhapsody by F. List, Moving Pictures (1949) to music of Third Brandenburg Concerto by I.S. Bach"

Influenced
Until his death in 1969, Fischinger influenced a large number of filmmakers such as, Harry Smith, Jordan Belson, Norman McLaren, and the brothers John and James Whitney, as an individual artist and experimental animator. The composer John Cage were among the artists not working with film who was directly influenced by Fischinger and his ideas on art. LINK

Lumigraph

"In the late 1940s, he also invented a color organ instrument that allowed one to play lights to any music very simply. His Lumigraph hides the lighting elements in a large frame, from which only a thin slit emits light. In a darkened room (with a black background) you can not see anything except when something moves into the thin "sheet" of light, so, by moving a finger-tip around in a circle in this light field, you can trace a colored circle (colored filters can be selected and changed by the performer). Any object can be used: a gloved hand, a drum-stick, a pot-lid (for a solid circle), a child's block (for a square), etc. Oskar performed certain compositions (such as Sibelius' "Valse Triste") publicly, at the Coronet Theater in Los Angeles, and at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1953, in connection with a one-man show of his abstract oil paintings

Fischinger's Lumograph was licensed for use in the 1960's sci-fi film, Time Travelers.

Oskar's original Lumigraph does survive, in the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, where it is played with some regularity, and it has been loaned to the Louvre in Paris and the Gemeente Museum in the Hague for performances by Oskar's widow Elfriede. Oskar's son Conrad also constructed two other Lumigraphs, one large one that was used on an Andy Williams television special, and a smaller one to use in Los Angeles performances. The Lumigraph also appeared in a 1964 science-fiction movie The Time Travelers, in which it is a "love machine" that allows people to vent their sexual urges in a harmless sensuality. LINK

Len lye

Direct Films
(1935 - 1980) approx "One of my art teachers put me onto trying to find my own art theory. After many morning walks...an idea hit me that seemed like a complete revelation. It was to compose motion, just as musicians compose sound."

"There has never been a great film unless it was created in the spirit of the experimental filmmaker."

Len Lye was a major figure in experimental filmmaking as well as a leading kinetic sculptor and an innovative theorist, painter and writer. He pioneered 'direct film,' film made without a camera, by painting and scratching images directly onto celluloid, by reworking found footage, by casting shadows of objects onto unexposed film, and by experimenting with a number of early color techniques.

"All of a sudden it hit me - If there was such a thing as composing music, there could be such a thing as composing motion. After all, there are melodic figures, why can't there be figures of motion?"

Example: Two Movie clips available at (excerpt 2 partcularily interesting): http://www.re-voir.com/html/lenlyeprojection.html

Hans Richter

Hand painted films

• Orchestration Approach
• Positive negative relationships
• Time

"We realized that the “orchestration” of time was the esthetic basis of this new art form."

Richter's position in the art world was unique. As one of the earliest exponents of Dada, he was also one of the first to recognize the new possibilities cinematography offered the artist. He participated in the first avant-garde film movement alongside Léger, Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, Cocteau and Dali, and later in New York his teachings would influence many of the "New American Cinema" filmmakers.
He worked initially with abstract and object animation sequences interspersed with nonrealistic live-action photography.
His collaboration with Viking Eggeling produced several important ideas. One was their use of "themes" or "instruments", transformations of one form into another. A second was the idea of continuity, the orchestration of a given instrument through different stages. Finally as these relationships multiplied, they realized that there was a sensation that the remembering eye received by carrying its attention from one detail, phase or sequence to another. Moved into film from experiments with scroll paintings

Films such as Rhythmus 21 (Rhythm 21) 1921

In 1921 Richter created his first film, Rhythmus 21. He used the rectangle (the shape of the screen) as his basic form and orchestrated with time. "It became possible to relate (in contrast-analogy) the various movements on this 'movie-canvas' to each other" (Richter2, p79). The contrasts were the opposites presented in the film: black against white, left against right, top against bottom. Portraying similarities while displaying these contrasts would result in analogies.

Shown in camera and rhythm class. web clip available at revoir website

FILMS available ar re-voir website:

(Germany)
Rhythmes

Scroll Paintings

eg Preludium (Prelude) 1919

Richter and Swedish painter Viking Eggeling experimented with several artistic techniques and different media for expression. such as the Chinese language. "They did not study the language to learn Chinese, but to understand the relationships between the lines and curves of the symbols. Eggeling's focus was more on the lines themselves, whereas Richter was concerned with the interplay between the lines.

This is when Richter begins to bring together his ideas positive-negative relationships and reshape them into rhythmic expression. "...a vertical line was accentuated by a horizontal, a strong line connected with a weak one, a single line gained importance from many lines etc."

…this kind of film gives memory nothing to hang on. At the mercy of "feeling", reduced to going with the rhythm according to the successive rise and fall of the breath and the heartbeat, we are given a sense of what feeling and perceiving really is: a process - MOVEMENT." -Hans Richter 1924

SEE:
EASEL-SCROLL-FILM Hans Richter Magazine of Art February, 1952 - EaselScrollFilm.pdf in manuals folder (from rhythmiclight website)

Contemporary handpainted films

Two Additions to the Tradition Two younger filmmakers have also devoted themselves to making abstract films directly on the filmstrip: Richard Reeves in Canada and Bärbel Neubauer in Austria and Germany.

Bärbel Neubauer

Roots: An Experiment in Images and Music by Bärbel Neubauer. Roots is a metamorphoses of color and form which is painted, drawn and stamped directly on blank film and corresponds to rhythm and music. Download quicktime at

http://www.awn.com/mag/issue3.6/3.6pages/3.6neubauerroots.html

Moonlight

Quicktime can be download at

http://www.awn.com/mag/issue3.6/3.6pages/3.6moritzfilms.html

Richard Reeves'

Linear Dreams

http://www.awn.com/mag/issue3.6/3.6pages/3.6moritzfilms.html

Linear Dreams, at seven minutes, has an epic sweep. It begins with a pulsating sound like a heartbeat and images of a throbbing red circle with nervous, scratched lines touching it from the sides,....

Putting these films in a context, bleep from site: http://www.awn.com/mag/issue3.6/3.6pages/3.6moritzfilms.html

Len Lye and Norman McLaren made such an impression with their abstract films painted and scratched directly onto film that when some other cameraless film begins to screen at a festival one often hears several disgruntled voices saying, "McLaren and Lye already did this"--as if nothing new could be done with the technique. Drawing or scratching directly onto film strips is just a technical means, and nobody would think of saying, "Painting on cels? That's already been done, so I won't watch this new film..." Several people like, the Italian brothers Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra, the German Hans Stoltenberg and the Belgian Henri Storck, painted abstractions on film before Lye and McLaren, but these films do not survive for us to see or judge. Films like Lye's Colour Box and Free Radicals or McLaren and Evelyn Lambart's Begone Dull Care are superb masterpieces that one can see over and over, and remember fondly. Plus, the tradition of direct abstract film continues: the great Basque painter Jose Antonio Sistiaga made a feature-length direct abstract film, Ere Erera Baleibu Icik Subua Aruaren, released in 1970, while Lye and McLaren were still alive. Believe it or not, all 75 minutes of it are fascinating, with a cumulative satisfaction. Sistiaga's 1989 7-minute Impressions In The High Atmosphere is a breathtaking masterpiece. A central circle, stable except for its fluctuating enamel-like textures, is surrounded by restless, swirling currents. His 1991 14-minute Nocturne is again a deeply moving, and very beautiful, film.

Abstract Filmmakers - Music Led

"Shortly after the end of the nineteenth century, a strong avante garde movement was moving throughout the world of art. Expressionism, constructivism, surrealism, cubism, and dadaism were all parts of this newly structured abstract art. Traditional theories of representational art were thrown out the window. New ways of working with space, shape, form and even time began to make their way into the artistic scene. Near the forefront of this movement was a painter by the name of Hans Richter." link

Twentieth-century painters and photographers in Germany and France, confronted with the increasing dynamism of everyday life, investigated the technical and aesthetic fundamentals of film. They hoped with this new medium to achieve 'a dance-like motion of the entire image' (W. Ruttmann). With new single frame exposure and montage techniques of single frames, the filmmakers of 'absolute' and surrealistic film succeeded in setting in motion even static images and stationary objects. Because of the numerous European experimental filmmakers who fled National Socialism, the avant-garde cinema of the Twenties reached the U.S.A during World War II. Young filmmakers eagerly adopted the avant-garde and further developed it in their own sound and colour films. Still today, artists with varying aspirations are interested in dancing images because it enables them to compose visual music, exhaust the borders of perception or extend dance to new dimensions. link

Visual Music
While theories for the visual equivalent of music have existed since antiquity, the mechanics necessary for the expression of the art of color and movement developed only recently into the current wide range of media and techniques. Yet along with this modern variety of methodology, there somehow came a polarization of the art form based on its varying technology. In the world of film it has been known as many things, including "Abstract Animation" or "Absolute Film." In video it has been referred to as "Video Synthesis" or "Image Processing." And centuries before either medium, artists invented their own one-of-a-kind hardware to project moving imagery in live performance. Some of the later "visual music" inventors gave the art their own name, such as "Lumia," "Mobil Color," or "Color Music." This auspicious collision of science, music, color, and light continues today in the development of visual music computer animation software such as "ElectroPaint," "Bliss Paint," and "The Music Animation Machine." Whatever the terminology, all forms of animated abstract expression have something in common and the iotaCenter was founded on the premise that this wide range of techniques and nomenclature share similar aesthetic goals which unite them into a single art. LINK

Man Ray

"Inventions of light forms and movements" is the way Man Ray described the films he made in the 1920s.

Surrealist Filmmaker

Visual Poetry

"Of the small handful of films which the great surrealist artist Man Ray made in the 1920s, Emak-Bakia is arguably the one which adheres most closely to the principles of Dadaist surrealism. It is also perhaps the most baffling of Man Ray’s films, involving some of his most extraordinary abstract visual imagery, with far less recognisable images than his other films, such as L’Étoile de mer and Les Mystères du château de Dé. The film is in fact closer in style to Man Ray’s 1923 experimental short film, Le Retour à la raison, and uses some of the techniques which the artist invented for that film. The title “Emak-Bakia” was taken from an old Basque expression, which translates as "Don't bother me." Link

True to Dadaist tradition, Man Ray questioned the application of prevailing logic in the sequence of images in his films. The represented should only stand for itself. Images should not be bound together by means of a general content, but only through montage. In this way, in "Emak Bakia”, light and its reflections along with the movement of bodies and objects become pure visual poetry. link

Emak-Bakia 1926 Art / Fantasy

Link to Real Media Streaming Video Clip
Man Ray: Emak Bakia (20:18)
Man Ray: L' Etoile de mer (17:59)
Man Ray: Poison (3:30)
http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/presentation/p41_115167-6.html

Marcel Duchamp

Rotorelief Discs

LINK
to animations of Duchamps Rotoreliefs (applets)
http://www.artscienceresearchlab.org/nav/barbiesf.htm

LINK
Assemblage of Duchamp Objects Exhibition - Movie Clips. These QuickTime movies contain animations originally produced as part of a proposal for "Hidden in Plain Sight," an interactive space representing the most complete collection ever assembled of objects signed by French-American artist Marcel Duchamp. As the four-part tour below reveals, the installation is a hybrid space designed for the study, exhibition and storage of Duchamp's works, in a hands-on environment. Link

Anaemic Cinema 1926

Absolute film to representational imagery

The creator of the early abstract films Opus I, II, III and IV, began this, probably his best know film, in 1926. Ruttmann directed the film and collaborated with Carl Mayer (a screen writer who had co-written the script for Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari), Karl Freund (the director of Fox-Europe Production), and Lore Leudesdorff who had already assisted Ruttmann with Opus III andIV. Rather than write a conventional script Ruttmann devised a card system that allowed for flexibility and reshuffling of ideas for scenes and the overall structure of the film. In addition to written notes for an idea, a card included specifications about the length of the scene, the desired atmosphere, and a visual sketch, a mini-storyboard so to speak. The music that accompanies the film was written by Edmund Meisel who also directed the orchestra at the film’s public opening at the Tauentzien-Palast in Berlin. Ruttmann and Meisel worked closely together aiming at a harmonious whole consisting of images and music, and Meisel described the music as a “conglomerate of the various sounds of a metropolis”.

Since creating his purely abstract Opus films Ruttmann had made a number of advertisement films for Julius Pinschewer, had worked on Paul Wegener’s film Lebende Buddhas, had created the dream sequence for Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen, and had made the beginning sequence, some of the background imagery, and other scenes for Lotte Reininger’s silhouette film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed. His advertisement films combined abstract with representational imagery and color with black and white sequences, and his contributions to the feature films meant, of course, that his largely abstract images were subsumed within a larger, representational whole. These were precisely the two uses of purely abstract filmic images that the critics of the absolute film approved of. By the time he began Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, Ruttmann had come to the conclusion that he needed representational imagery to accomplish his vision in film.

link

Clips of Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927) available at: Link

In 1921 the first of Walter Ruttmann´s series of Opus-films were completed. Ruttmann was one of the artists of the German avant-garde who broke new ground with his experiments, and influenced new artists to explore the potential of cinema.

The use of the computer in experimental film making has a rich history which reached a peak in the late 1960s, but stemmed from the early approaches and experimental 16mm work by key figures John and James Whitney in the late 1940s.

The Whitney brothers were exploring 16mm experimental film, gaining a reputation for their Film Exercises made between 1941-44. The Whitney's had a formidable background in traditional film making techniques winning first prize at the first Experimental Film Festival in Belgium in 1949.

John Whitney (1917-1995) later became director of animated films at UPA producing, in association with Saul Bass, the stylized and hypnotic opening title sequence for Hitchcock's Vertigo. By the early 1960s, with his own company Motion Graphics Inc., he was exploring his passion for the realisation of experimental films using hand built technologies.

John and James designed and built an "analogue computer" - a machine to realise effects and ideas that had up to that point no technical means of expression. At the time they said they were "trying to make something and there wasn't a machine available for making it".

It allowed infinitely complex rotational camera movement, filters and multiple variations for shutter operations, including slit-scanning; the technique Douglas Trumbull later developed and refined for Stanley Kubrick's experimental sequences in 2001, but which had actually been used by the Whitney family a number of years earlier.

Apart from collaborations with his brother, James Whitney (1921-1982) made two key films during this period - Yantra (1950-55) and Lapis (1963-66) which explore the mandalic possibilities of film. The first Yantra, was made painstakingly by hand using animation techniques and the second Lapis utilised the advantages offered by the analogue computer being able to generate more complex imagery much faster. LINK

Digital Harmony

John Whitney's classic book, "Digital Harmony" (1980), described/illustrated what went into the creation of "Arabesque." "Digital Harmony" also set forth John Whitney's theories on fusing music and imagery. For him music was visual, imagery musical, and digital computers offered the possibility of algorithmically melding the two. With the "Moondrum" (1991) series of computer graphics films he composed a musical soundtrack on a midi keyboard simultaneous to generating abstract imagery. LINK

The 80's would see an expansion of Whitney's exploration of digital harmony. By now he was composing his own music, searching for, as he writes, "a special relationship between musical and visual design." (Whitney, 1991).

Whitney was defining a new kind of composer: One with the ability to conceive ideas both musically and visually.

"Whether quick or slow, action, as well as harmony, determines much of the shape of my own audio-visual work today. Action itself has an impact on emotions. Fluid, orderly action generates or resolves tensions much in the manner that orderly sequences of resonant tonal harmony have an impact on emotion and feeling..." (Whitney, 1991).

The late 1980's would see numerous John Whitney works, combinations of original music and visuals. From Spirals in 1988, to Moondrum, a Native-American influenced series of works completed in the span of 1989-1995, Whitney was now using a special composing program developed in association with programmer Jerry Reed called the RDTD, that enabled the artist to create "musical design intertwined with color design tone-for-tone, played against action-for-action" (Whitney, 1996). LINK

VIDEO CLIP
Digital Harmony Quicktime
http://www.siggraph.org/artdesign/profile/whitney/digiharmon.html

Arabesque Quicktime
http://www.siggraph.org/artdesign/profile/whitney/arabesque.html

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.

"The compositions at best are intended to point a way toward future developments in the arts. Above all, I want to demonstrate that electronic music and electronic color-in-action combine to make an inseparable whole that is much greater than its parts." John Whitney, Sr. died September 22, 1995 in Los Angeles, California, ending a remarkable career that linked music to experimental film and later to computer imaging. John Hales Whitney was born April 8, 1917 in Pasadena, California; he attended Pomona College, Claremont University before spending a year in Paris from 1937 to 1938. While in Paris, he studied Schoenberg's Twelve Tone techniques with Rene Liebowitz and worked on the animation of abstract designs. KEYWORDS Motion Pattern Time

Links

http://www.siggraph.org/artdesign/profile/whitney/motion.html
http://www.wigged.net/html/news/whitney.html
http://www.siggraph.org/artdesign/profile/whitney/whitney.html
http://www.paradise2012.com/visualMusic/JohnWhitney.html
http://www.siggraph.org/education/stuff/spacef95/john.html

McLaren was born in Scotland in 1914 and while studying art he had become increasingly interested in the potential of filmmaking.

McLaren began painting directly on stock in the 30s and in 1949 he made the wonderful Begone Dull Care to jazz music by Oscar Peterson's trio. According to Giannalberto Bendazzi the film won excited acclaim from Picasso who praised it in the following way; "Finally, something new!" (Bendazzi 1994:116)

McLaren´s films shows a multitude of different styles and techniques from minimalistic abstract work to short narrative films like the pixillated Oscar winner Neighbours (1952) and the beautiful interpretation of dance in Pas de Deux (1959).

McLaren´s investigations of the cinema includes the production of synthetic sound as in the mentioned Neighbours and Two Bagatelles (1952).

Cinematic experiments creating sound without using external sources began in the 20s with the recognition that patterns read optically can produce sound. This very direct notion of "seeing" sound attracted Fischinger in the early 30s as it later did McLaren. LINK

Influenced
Richard Reeves´ (b. 1959) sparkling 1997 film Linear Dreams (also to be seen in the International programme) is an outstanding firework of sound and image which explores this area. The pulsating play with colours is part of an audio-visual totality of abstract patterns and figurative elements, and it is made totally in McLaren´s spirit. LINK

The investigation of visual realities is crucial for the Danish filmmaker Lejf Marcussen (b. 1936). In the early 70s he joined the Danish broadcasting company Danmarks Radio where he began making experimental films. While his films reveals a mixture of different techniques the notion of film as non-verbal artform is strong in all of them.

In Tonespor (1983) he makes a visual interpretation based on music by Carl Nielsen. Each instrumental group or musical "voice" is represented by a coloured line which closely follow the musical movement.

Animation as music by Rune Kreutz
http://www.animertedager.no/anasmus.html

COLLAPSING IMAGE INTO MUSIC: Part 1 Musique Concrete, electronica & Sound Art published: The Wire No.166, 1997, London
http://media-arts.rmit.edu.au/Phil_Brophy/SCRTHSTartcls/ShatterHarmony.html

Bridging the Digital Divide
http://www.filmwaves.co.uk/3digital.htm