Note: If you see this text you use a browser which does not support usual Web-standards. Therefore the design of Media Art Net will not display correctly. Contents are nevertheless provided. For greatest possible comfort and full functionality you should use one of the recommended browsers.

Themesicon: navigation pathOverview of Media Articon: navigation pathAudio
 
Modell 5 (Granular Synthesis), 1994Lichtspiel Opus I (Ruttmann, Walter), 1921
 
 
 

icon: previous page

manipulation, i. e. what happens when the material extracted from the medium is not defamiliarized in itself, but rather is prevented from its full scope of movement by leaps in time made possible by technology.[39] In «MODELL 5» (1994), the movements by the performer shown in the portrait, Akemi Takeya, appear to be dehumanized. Here it becomes clear that the characteristic qualities of a person should not be sought in the substance of the individual image, but rather in the person's movements.

Intermedia

Intermedia forms of expression seek correspondences between phenomena in different areas of perception. Technical transformations are highly efficient in this respect, because once they are configured a mechanical structure can be evaluated with arbitrary inputs. In the process, it turns out that the translation code is the actual problem associated with intermedia: the question arises of which rules should be applied to transform sound into image, spatial movement into timbre, or harmony into color. As early as 1729, Louis-Bertrand Castel built the ‹optical cembalo,› an instrument that translated sounds into color. Amongst

 

others, Kastner's «pyrophone» (1870) and Rimington's «color organ» (1910) pursued this idea further.[40] After about 1910, the associative transference of musical-spatial forms into painting became more frequent.[41] It was not until after 1900 that technologies were developed which allowed flexible transference between areas of perception. When, for instance, the poem for orchestra «Prométhée— Le Poème du feu» by the mystic and synaesthetician Aleksandr Skrjabin premiered in 1911, the two voices for colored light had to be produced using simple light bulbs.[42] Film involved new technologies and suggested that fine art, which in the nineteenth century was understood purely as spatial art, could come closer to the temporal art of music. Walter Ruttmann's composition «Lichtspiel Opus I,» which premiered in 1921, mobilizes abstract visual forms and colors in a characteristic musical style. The introduction of the optical sound recording principle enabled the analogies between image and music to be drawn even closer using technical coupling. Similar to what Moholy-Nagy had suggested for the record, Oskar Fischinger took up the technically conditioned visual manifestation of sound: the relief-like jagged script of

icon: next page