"MAKING SENSE VII"
06-09 June 2005
I attended the Making Sense VII workshop led by Erich Berger and Peter Voltova
at Atelier Nord, Oslo.
This workshop, subtitled Tangible Dreams, was a project-orientated workshop where participants could develop ideas, concepts or particular features of current projects in a competence-sharing environment. The workshop was attended by a group of artists from various genres and at different stages in their projects.
Prepending the workshop I was inspired by an article: THE OCULAR HARPSICHORD OF LOUIS-BERTRAND CASTEL. The Science and Aesthetics of an Eighteenth-Century Cause Célèbre, Maarten Franssen, 1991.
[extract]
Acknowledging the possibility of colour music, Krüger set out to design
an ocular harpsichord that would solve the problem of the missing chords,
"an instrument radically different from Castel’s, but in all respects
fitter to make the eyes delight in colours". He began by adopting an
arbitrary colour scale, redorange-yellow-green-blue-purple-violet, matching
the scale in C major, which amounted more or less to reversing the Newtonian
spectral colours. Then he arranged a number of candles, each placed in the
focus of a hollow mirror, in the form of a half-circle; the beams of light
coming from the candles were each focused by a lens, such that all the beams
projected into one point, the middle of the full circle, where a screen was
set up. Each key of the instrument was not only triggering an ordinary harpsichord
mechanism but was attached as well to a lever that normally screened off one
of the beams, but when moved by pressing the key, pushed a circular window
of coloured glass into the beam, resulting in the projection of a coloured
circle onto the screen. The diameters of the windows decreased as the corresponding
tones got lower, enabling the simultaneous projection of different coloured
circles to visualize a colour chord, showing the root of the chord as a primary
colour along the circumference of the projected circle and an array of increasingly
superimposed colours towards the centre.
My intention was to build a colour organ based on Scriabin's colour/scale
correlation preferences (click image below to enlarge), and Krüger's
ideas of cascading cirles of colour in MAX/Jitter. Rather than using the notion
that different octaves are expressed as circles of colour with varying diameters,
I wished to explore the notion of time/space such that cascading circles are
caused when notes/circles receed in time.
IMAGE: Three Centuries of Color Scales, Fred Collopy
Stage 1: Conceptualise the idea of cascading circles with Erich.
Stage 2: With Peter I used Jitter's draw object to make simple coloured circles
of varying sizes.
Stage 3: The circles were manipulated in size dynamically.
Stage 4: Halli Kalli (who sat on the same table as me) showed me open gl objects
and helped me to create several spheres of varying colours.
Stage 5: With help from both Halli and Peter I was able to manipulate the
size and position of 3 spheres.
Stage 6: Following the workshop I continued to work on the colour organ alone.
I simplified the structure by working on one sphere only. I used the keyboard
object and assigned colour properties (according to Scriabin's scheme of things)
to each of the 12 notes in an octave. Used qt instruments for sound.
Stage 7: As each key is hit the position of the sphere is manipulated such
that it moves close up to far away (appears to "shrink").
Stage 8: Implemented lighting and texture (using qt movies). The idea is that
each octave can have its own identifiable quality - and applying various textures
may be one way of acheiving this:
Stage 9: Future. Try to implement the notion of multiple cascading spheres
instead of a single sphere.
REFERENCE LINKS
Maarten Franssen
Associate Professor
Philosophy Section, Delft University of Technology
http://www.tbm.tudelft.nl/webstaf/maartenf/
IMAGE: Three Centuries of Color Scales, Fred Collopy, Rhythmic Light
http://www.RhythmicLight.com
Halli Kalli
http://halli.lhi.is/
For more info on the Making Sense workshops got to the project section of
Atelier Nord's website:
http://www.anart.no