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Themesicon: navigation pathSound and Imageicon: navigation pathSound & Vision
 
Snownoise (Nicolai, Carsten), 2001aka noto, crystals/reworked (Nicolai, Carsten), 2003242.pilots live in Bruxelles (242pilots), 2002
 
 
 

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so-called ‹granular synthesis› creates completely new audio and visual worlds from the smallest image-sound particles. They also use the different economic systems of music and fine art: Granular Synthesis' live appearances are managed by a professional concert agency, but their videos and installations are sold on the art market by galleries.

Carsten Nicolai (aka noto) started as a painter, but he is now at least as well known as an electronic musician, using the pseudonym noto. He too succeeds in combining art's and music's different sales systems in a masterly fashion: he exhibits pictures and sound installations in museums and galleries, he runs the raster noton label [EL] for electronic music and appears as a musician in concert with live electronics and his own visuals. But unlike Granular Synthesis he leads a kind of double life, as he is seen either as a musician or an artist according to the audience. He clearly finds music's widely effective distribution structure more in tune with the times than that of art, which relies on the unique object. [29] Aesthetically Nicolai is interested in the relationship between visual and acoustic phenomena like phase shifts, noise and interference. He also uses natural science and perception theory to analyse them more precisely. As has already been said, light and sound are physically

 

separate phenomena that are associated only in terms of human perception. But Nicolai finds model processes for creating analogies for them within the phenomenon itself: in the 2001 «Snownoise» installation the growth of snow crystals is influenced by the sounds to be heard around them. Generative, self-organizing patterns and loops for sound and image were used in a comparable way in live performances like the «Crystals/reworked» (2003).

The 242.pilots group (HC Gilje from Norway, Lukasz Lysakowski from Poland and Kurt Ralske from the USA) do live video improvisations, sometimes as a trio, sometimes solo, sometimes with invited musicians, sometimes without. Shows like «242.pilots live in Bern» (2002) or «242.pilots live in Bruxelles» (2002) offer collective visual improvisation, like a jam session. Some VJs work in ‹crews› as well, but 242.pilots do not just merely illustrate DJs' music: the two sides respond to each other in the interplay of music and video. It is reminiscent of comparable distinctions in the 1920s, when Ruttmann's films were always accompanied by composition created especially for them, while Oskar Fischinger restricted himself to interpreting existing

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