Sense of hearing, sense of vision, Coop, YouTube

Alexander Horwath: When it comes to the topic of visualisation of music, I’d like to note first of all that the sense of hearing and the sense of vision had already begun to interact in sound film from the late 1920s, early 1930s. That may in the first instance sound banal, but it is a fact nonetheless. One of the reasons why this is so rarely emphasised is that in the vast majority of cases film, in its commercial and industrial variants, gives a kind of servile function to sound. Nevertheless, various artists have addressed these issues, particularly in the early days of sound film and I would like to draw here on two examples that are often mentioned in the same breath, but which I would view as two different manifestations of media-related complication or of synaesthetic work: Oskar Fischinger and Len Lye.
I feel that Fischinger always stopped before he reached a certain boundary – in the sense that he took existing music, and famous existing music to boot, as his lodestone in his abstract visual and rhythmic creations. This includes Brahms, Beethoven and other classical musicians, and the fame of these works serves to underpin his chromatic and rhythmic inventions, which thus always function as a kind of literal translation. In that sense I would say that a hierarchy between the two levels is maintained. In contrast, if you consider Len Lye’s films from the same period, he certainly also uses music that already existed in most cases, but it is unknown music, non-Western music, songs that do not bear the stamp of familiarity. Lye marks one of the earliest historical moments in which, as a result of the discourse between the two arts or perceptual materials, something comes into being which did not exist in this form previously and there does not appear to be an kind of obvious hierarchical relationship.
In the context of the contemporary visualist scene, I would be interested in discovering how much this is a topic and whether this kind of relationship is discussed in critiques. In essence the crux of the issue is always whether one type of material serves the other and whether that is all right, or whether on the other hand attempts are made to avoid these very hierarchies and subordinations.

Eva Fischer: Yes, these points are being debated, although the terminology has not really been clarified yet. What is a VJ, and who would tend instead to call themselves a visualist? There are in any event broadly two basic tendencies here: VJs should probably be categorised as falling under the Fischinger model – visualising generally occurs live, accompanying a musical performance, with the two levels essentially interlinked only to a small degree. In contrast, genuine collaborations, the interaction between a music act and a video act, are increasingly in demand. Above all in the field of installations, cooperations are emerging in which image and sound are created simultaneously, rather than one existing before the other.
Software plays an important role when it comes to visualisations in the live context. This was also the case for Fischinger and Lye, albeit working with different technical possibilities. At present we see increasing use of software which, viewed in purely technological terms, generates images and sound from similar or even from the same code. This is of course an entirely different approach to live video-mixing, which makes use of existing material. Particularly in the club context, I would rather see the VJ as analogous to the DJ playing records. Other visualists are more similar to a live act, generating the material live, as is also the case in the realm of audio.

Horwath: Theoretically it would also be possible to imagine that semi-prepared data and an artistic-creative act could give rise in a live setting to a visual and audio representation of these data, which share a common source. It does not seem to me to be necessary for both functions to be separated, with one person in charge of the sound and another responsible for the images. However, there is a pronounced adherence to classical collaborative models – just like in American or French gangster films: there’s one guy who’s a real sharp shooter, another is a safe-breaker and they rob a bank together, because they combine so much specialised know-how. In digital culture too there still seem to be spheres of competence. Does that have something to do with such »old-fashioned considerations« as talent or specific aesthetic abilities?

Fischer: There are definitely also artists who perform solo as an AV act or a Live Cinema act. It is therefore not generally the case that collaborations come into being in keeping with the model you have just described. One reason for this is certainly individual specialisation, but factors such as the time needed and the budget available also play a role. Concentration on one’s own branch may perhaps hamper new approaches that would become possible through cooperation. We repeatedly see this with sound:frame too: when projects are initiated, you have certain ideas about the result, but often something comes into being that you could not have imagined in advance, particularly if there is a cooperation with musicians or artists from other disciplines. This phenomenon constitutes one of the decisive qualities of cooperations.

Horwath: When I think back to earlier avant-garde situations, there are, to the best of my knowledge, very few collaborative set-ups in which people working between different art forms, in an interdisciplinary or intercreative fashion, have produced something really outstanding. The post-war film »Dreams That Money Can Buy« (1947) springs to mind, a full-length feature that Hans Richter made together with a series of prominent artists, above all from a Surrealist background. Each of these artists created one episode of the film, with Hans Richter as the »supervisor«. Ultimately however there is something ridiculous about the film, as essentially it is merely a film version of styles that we are familiar with from Surrealist painting.
There are certainly not many historical examples for this kind of collaboration. Although there are examples, which go back a very long way, for what you call software – I am thinking of the light-sound film, where the sound track is present as an »image« on the film material. Rudolf Pfenninger’s early experiments, for example »Tönende Handschrift« (»Sounding Handwriting«, (1932), also made that visible during projection. Another example is the first film Kurt Kren released »1/57 Versuch mit synthetischem Ton« (»1/57: Test with Synthetic Sound«, (1957). This appears very simple, but comprises the great achievement of producing the sound in just as »manual-pictorial« a way as the image. Kren scratched or drew the sound track onto the film. When the film runs through the projector, we hear the sound that the drawing produces in the pick-up. Perhaps I am overlooking important differences, but this seems to me to be very close to contemporary forms, which tend to proceed more by subtraction, by reduction, in a certain sense allowing the various perceptual materials to emerge from each other.
On the one hand there are individual artists, who work in all these materials simultaneously, experimenting with what is possible and demonstrating a certain talent for that. On the other hand we find groups, collaborations, discipline-specific contributions, where the following question arises, posed perhaps in excessively hierarchical terms: at what point can a work be said to be completed or ready to be made public? Something bubbles up; there is the fascinating experience of moving ahead when it would have been impossible to progress alone. But how does the genius of the group or its joint intelligence decide that a project is concluded?

Fischer: It is mostly time that sets an end-point for the whole process. In addition, someone in the group generally takes a leading role and makes certain decisions. If this hierarchical function is not present, a project becomes intriguing in an entirely different way, as substantive issues take centre-stage to an even greater degree.
Another question that would interest me is how art is made visible. Thinking of the sound:frame festival, for example, numerous visualists are involved in the team, including myself. Here collaboration functions by endeavouring to make art visible out of the scene, to form a platform. The external function of the curator does not exist in this case, but instead everyone who participates is directly involved. I am interested to hear how the situation looked in the case of historical experimental films, and whether there are parallels in this respect.

Horwath: Absolutely. One decisive point is that an emerging scene views itself as being out-of-the-ordinary and realises that something is occurring that has not yet found any resonance in the existing categories of curatorship, institutions, museums, performance venues etc. One issue that is always a worry and constitutes a real risk is the way that an emerging scene tends, if left to its own devices, to simply flare up for a fairly brief moment. It is a well-known phenomenon, and there was certainly a model for what you describe, in the early to mid-1960s, namely New York underground films and the co-op movement. In the preceding decade, the 1950s, artists who worked like this lived in relative isolation. Of course, art scenes popped up repeatedly here and there, for example around Frank Stauffacher in San Francisco and Amos Vogel in New York, but the focus was on performance venues where individual artists met. The 1960s co-op movement has in a certain sense remained the model for a mode of organisation in independent film and avant-garde cinema right up to the present day. This co-op system aims at distribution that functions outside the limits of local contexts. Distribution meant looking at how the film industry operates, namely on the basis of a worldwide system of distributors, at least as far as the American industry was concerned. Distribution organisations that functioned in a similar fashion were therefore set up, founded by the filmmakers. That is still the case today, if you consider the key organisations, such as Canyon Cinema on the US West Coast, The Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York, Lightcone in Paris, even sixpackfilm in Vienna. In addition, there is also the role of those who write about film, such as Jonas Mekas, who was not only a critic at »The Village Voice«, but also made films that the New York Coop distributed, and co-founded Anthology Film Archives. This pattern of multiple activities, along with multiple ways of stabilising a scene by endowing it with various forms of organisation and discursive traditions is always repeated. Often you hear reproaches in this respect, alleging that a group of friends are reciprocally giving each other jobs or status, writing about the selfsame films that are shown in their own cinema. This reproach is understandable, and each generation raises it about a previous generation that has become established to a certain degree. Conversely, it would never be possible to become so established without tapping into and working on these organisational models, this form of collaborative establishment of structures. Perhaps looking back with hindsight at the history of the Coops or the avant-garde film scenes in the 1960s it is possible to pick up on something productive, and as a result to avoid mistakes and certain dead-ends that were explored back then.

Fischer: It is interesting in this respect that by now it is actually possible to talk of several generations of visualists, two, perhaps even three generations. The first generation began working in what was still an analogue context, with Super-8mm projectors, and a lot of photography and slides. Around 1990 this began to develop very much along digital lines, moving in a direction in which highly established visualists still work today. Finally, over the last few years, there has been a new twist in developments due to the software we have already discussed: from video-mixing to more generative software. Careful observation reveals that yet another new generation is emerging, working to a much greater degree with aspects of sensory over-stimulation. It is a kind of YouTube generation, moving in an entirely different direction in terms of the content, working a great deal with found footage and influenced by Street Art. As I said right at the outset, the concepts involved here have not really been defined yet, particularly if electronic music is taken as the point of departure, a field with a very pronounced division into genres – a phenomenon not found in visualisation. Even the terms VJ and visualist mean something different.

Horwath: That is certainly also in part because, in contrast to the music scene, where dozens of magazines or journals exist, there is a dearth of literature, including academic writing. That means there are no platforms on which formation of concepts and discourse could unfold as rapidly as one would actually like.

Fischer: That’s true. The platforms in Europe are mainly festivals. A great deal of discourse can also be found at the Mapping Festival in Geneva for example, set up by a group that programmes and produces one of the best-known VJ softwares. Or in Berlin at Club Transmediale, which is also run by media artists. These large conferences are a place to meet international colleagues; all the most important people in the scene are there. Discourse is thus created every month and there are blogs – but for example no magazine.

Horwath: Do these blogs have more of a fan-based focus or do they tend to be analytical too? Is there any awareness that there is a need to develop concepts or terminology?

Fischer: No, there’s almost no sense of this to date.