Luigi Russolo with his assistant Ugo Piatti and their Intonarumori (noise machines)
The Art of Noise
by Luigi Russolo February 22, 2004
Luigi Russolo (1885 – 1947), Italian futurist painter and musician and inventor of the “intonarumori” expounded his musical theories in 1913 in this manifesto entitled “L’arte dei rumori” (The Art of Noises) in which he presented his ideas about the use of noises in music.
Dear Balilla Pratella, great Futurist composer,
In Rome, in the Costanzi Theatre, packed to capacity, while I was listening to the orchestral performance of your overwhelming FUTURIST MUSIC, with my Futurist friends, Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Balla, Soffici, Papini and Cavacchioli, a new art came into my mind which only you can create, the Art of Noises, the logical consequence of your marvelous innovations.
Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent.
Amidst this dearth of noises, the first sounds that man drew from a pieced reed or streched string were regarded with amazement as new and marvelous things. Primitive races attributed sound to the gods; it was considered sacred and reserved for priests, who used it to enrich the mystery of their rites. And so was born the concept of sound as a thing in itself, distinct and independent of life, and the result was music, a fantastic world superimposed on the real one, an inviolatable and sacred world. It is easy to understand how such a concept of music resulted inevitable in the hindering of its progress by comparison with the other arts. The Greeks themselves, with their musical theories calculated mathematically by Pythagoras and according to which only a few consonant intervals could be used, limited the field of music considerably, rendering harmony, of which they were unaware, impossible.
More on Theremin Vox
Robert Frank (American, b. Switzerland, 1924)
Trolley—New Orleans, 1955
Gelatin silver print; 8 5/8 x 13 1/16 in. (21.9 x 33.2 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005 (2005.100.454)
Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans
This provocative documentary, a regular on the film-festival circuit, examines the history of suburban life and the wisdom of this distinctly American way of life. A post-World War II concept, suburbia attracted droves of people, giving rise to sprawl and all that comes with it — good and bad. How has the environment been affected by this lifestyle, and is it sustainable? Canadian director Gregory Greene dares to ask all the tough questions.
Minor White
Cobblestone House, Avon, NY
Vintage Gelatin Silver Print, 1957
7 1/4 x 9 1/4″
No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen. – Minor White
Filed under: Photography
Joseph Stalin “When all you see is a picture, Stalin could’ve been anyone’s kind grandfather. You can’t see the millions of people on his conscience or what a paranoid, dreadful human being he was.”
Nina Maria Kleivan’s provocative images of a baby dressed up as various famous dictators – including Hitler, Stalin and Mao – have caused something of a stir. As Kleivan says: “We are all born as a blank slate. Who knows who we will become?”
The Six Feet Under Storyboards are an excellent example to begin the process of organizing our video works and to learn about storyboards.
“We wanted something that you would see week after week and be entertained enough to keep watching. Something that wouldn’t completely reveal itself on the first viewing.” Alan Ball, Six Feet Under
And Digital Kitchen helped to make that happen
http://www.d-kitchen.com
Filed under: Video Art
Blood of a Poet,1930
Jean Cocteau
50 minutes
Black and White
La jetée (English: The Jetty and The Pier) (1962) is a 28-minute black and white science fiction film by Chris Marker. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel.
In the movie, the survivors of a destroyed Paris in the aftermath of World War III live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. They research time travel, hoping to send someone back before the devastating war to recover food, medicine, or energy for the present, “to summon the past and future to the aid of the present.” The traveler is a male prisoner; his vague but obsessive childhood memory of witnessing a woman (Hélène Chatelain) during a violent incident on the boarding platform (“The Jetty”) at Orly Airport is used as the key to his journey back in time. He is thrown back to the past again and again. He repeatedly meets and speaks to the woman who was present at the terminal. After his successful passages to the past, the experimenters attempt to send him into the deep future. In a brief meeting with the technologically advanced people of the future, he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed society.
On his return, he is cast aside by his jailers to die. Before he can be executed, he is contacted by the people of the future, who offer to help him escape to their time, but he asks to be returned to the time of his childhood. He is returned, only to find the violent incident he partially witnessed as a child was his own death as an adult.
La jetée has no dialogue aside from small sections of muttering in German; the story is told by a voice-over narrator. It is constructed almost entirely from optically printed photographs playing out as a photomontage of varying pace. It contains only one brief shot originating on a motion-picture camera. The stills were taken with a Pentax 24×36 and the motion-picture segment was shot with a 35mm Arriflex. The film score was composed by Trevor Duncan. (wikipedia)
(originally posted on 1/10/07):
Today we watched Chris Marker’s Le Jette – ON FILM – this was a surprise to know that the school has a copy. You probably are wondering what’s the difference? Well we were able to watch the film the way that it was created and not transfer to vhs or dvd – the noise of the projector is all part of the experience. So this was our major transition from the still to the moving image. The film 12 Monkeys gives credit to Le Jetee as inspiration. Any thoughts?
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.
View from the Window at Le Gras.
ca1826.
Heliograph, in original frame.
25.8 x 29.0 cm.
Harry Ransom Center
University of Texas at Austin
Long before the first public announcements of photographic processes in 1839, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a scientifically-minded gentleman living on his country estate near Chalon-sur-Saône, France, began experimenting with photography. Fascinated with the craze for the newly-invented art of lithography which swept over France in 1813, he began his initial experiments by 1816. Unable to draw well, Niépce first placed engravings, made transparent, onto engraving stones or glass plates coated with a light-sensitive varnish of his own composition. These experiments, together with his application of the then-popular optical instrument, the camera obscura, would eventually lead him to the invention of the new medium.
Description:
An Inside Look at the Lives of the Heirs to The World’s Greatest Family Fortunes
Jamie Johnson, 20-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical empire, turns in a remarkable documentary about the lives of the children of the wealthiest families in the world. This 2003 Sundance Film Festival Selection and Emmy-nominated documentary shows Johnson turning the camera on himself and 10 of his friends. Born Rich candidly reveals the great privileges and the excess baggage that go along with their high net worth. For the first time ever in a feature documentary, hear Trumps, Bloombergs and Vanderbilts discuss the one subject everybody knows is taboo—money, and lots of it.
The Thaumatropic Theater, 2006
Sara Barry
The THAUMATROPE is a toy that was popular in Victorian times. A disk or card with a picture on each side is attached to two pieces of string. When the strings are twirled quickly between the fingers the two pictures appear to combine into a single image due to persistence of vision.
http://courses.ncssm.edu/gallery/collections/toys/html/exhibit06.htm
The ZOETROPE is a device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures. It consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. Beneath the slits, on the inner surface of the cylinder, is a band which has either individual frames from a video/film or images from a set of sequenced drawings or photographs. As the cylinder spins, the user looks through the slits at the pictures on the opposite side of the cylinder’s interior. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together, so that the user sees a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, the equivalent of a motion picture. Cylindrical zoetropes have the property of causing the images to appear thinner than their actual sizes when viewed in motion through the slits.
http://courses.ncssm.edu/gallery/collections/toys/html/exhibit10.htm
The PRAXINOSCOPE is an animation device, the successor to the zoetrope. It was invented in France in 1877 by Charles-Émile Reynaud. Like the zoetrope, it used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning cylinder. The praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors, placed so that the reflections of the pictures appeared more or less stationary in position as the wheel turned. Someone looking in the mirrors would therefore see a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, with a brighter and less distorted picture than the zoetrope offered.
http://courses.ncssm.edu/gallery/collections/toys/html/exhibit11.htm
The PHENAKISTOSCOPE (also spelled phenakistiscope) is an early animation device, the predecessor to the zoetrope. It was invented in 1831 simultaneously by the Belgian Joseph Plateau and the Austrian Simon von Stampfer. One variant of the phenakistoscope was a spinning disc mounted vertically on a handle. Around the center of the disc was drawn a series of pictures corresponding to frames of the animation; around its circumference was a series of radial slits. The user would spin the disc and look through the moving slits at the disc’s reflection in a mirror. The scanning of the slits across the reflected images kept them from simply blurring together, so that the user would see a rapid succession of images with the appearance of a motion picture. Another variant had two discs, one with slits and one with pictures; this was slightly more unwieldy but needed no mirror. Unlike the zoetrope and its successors, the phenakistoscope could only practically be used by one person at a time.
http://courses.ncssm.edu/gallery/collections/toys/html/exhibit07.htm
The STEREOSCOPE is a device for viewing stereographic cards, which are cards that contain two separate images that are printed side-by-side to create the illusion of a three-dimensional image. This is an example of stereoscopy. When stereographic cards are viewed without a stereoscopic viewer the user is required to force his eyes either to cross, or to diverge, so that the two images appear to be three. Then as each eye sees a different image, the effect of depth is achieved in the central image of the three. This is the oldest method of stereoscopy, having been discovered in the mid-19th century by Charles Wheatstone. In the late 19th and early 20th century stereo cards, stereo pairs or stereographs were popularly sold. The cards had a pair of photographs, usually taken with a special camera that took the pair of images from slightly separated views simultaneously. Cards were printed with these views (often with explanatory text); when the cards were looked at through the double-lensed viewer, called a stereoscope or a stereopticon (a common misnomer), a three-dimensional image could be seen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscope
The MAGIC LANTERN is an ancestor of the slide projector. With an oil lamp and a lens, images painted on glass plates could be projected on to a suitable screen. By the 19th century, there was a thriving trade of itinerant projectionists, who would travel across the United Kingdom with their magic lanterns, and a large number of slides, putting on shows in towns and villages. Some of the slides came with special effects, by means of extra sections that could slide or rotate across the main plate. One of the most famous of these, very popular with children, was the Rat-swallower, where a series of rats would be seen leaping into a sleeping man’s mouth. During the Napoleonic wars, a series was produced of a British ship’s encounter with a French navy ship, ending patriotically with the French ship sinking in flames, accompanied by the cheers of the audience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_lantern
“ImXCocteau”, 2009
13:12 trt, color, stereo, DV, 4:3
Video: Alysse Stepanian, Music: Philip Mantione
While manipulating footage from Jean Cocteau’s “Blood of A Poet”, I sensed an excitement about the new technology that Cocteau must have felt eighty years ago, when he experimented with manipulating images through filming tricks and available technology of the time. (Alysse Stepanian) The music for ImXCocteau was created using custom software written in MAX/Msp that manipulated soprano sax samples (Eric Roberts) and field recordings made in the desert. (Philip Mantione)
Alysse Stepanian and Philip Mantione have collaborated on videos, mutimedia performances and installations since 1986. In 2005 -2007 they collaborated as BOX 1035, creating installations in Berlin, Beijing, and New York. Beijing’’s City Weekend Magazine listed their 2006 installation, “Don’t be afraid, be ready” as number one of the top 5 exhibits.
www.box1035.com
Atrium Gallery – Western Michigan University
Alysse Stepanian’s videos, installations, paintings, photographs, web art, and performances have been presented in over 30 countries. She is the creator and curator of Manipulated Image video screenings based in the US, and has participated in collaborative curations with VideoChannel Cologne. For October of 2012 she is curating a collection of videos for art:screen fest in Örebro, Sweden. Screenings of her own videos include: The Museum of Actual Art, Mexico City; Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, Maryland; Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires (as part of ECVP Vol. 3); Arad Art Museum in Romania; Anthology Film Archives, New York City; Vasteras Konstmuseum, Sweden; 4th Gaza International Festival For Video Art; Teatro Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Arte Cubano in Havana; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin.
http://alyssestepanian.com
http://manipulatedimage.com
Philip Mantione has composed music for orchestra, chamber ensembles, computer, fixed media, interactive performance, multimedia installations and experimental video. His music has premiered at such venues as Merkin Hall in NYC; the Bing Theatre at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; FILE 2011 and 2010 – Electronic Language International Festival – Hypersonica at SESI’ Cultural Centre in San Paulo, Brazil; the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, NM; European Media Arts Festival in 2001 in Osnabrück, Germany; and most recently a 16 channel audio piece at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona, Spain.
http://www.philipmantione.com
