Visible music
with idea of the Fluxus.
Sound is constant and everywhere. Sound is a time-based medium. As technology has advanced it has meant that artists have been able to utilize recording equipment and audio devices in order to explore sound as art work.
By: Seyeon Park
1. Background Study
-History of Sonic art: John Cage and Fluxus and sonic art
Fluxus is an international and interdisciplinary artistic collective (or network) established in the 1960s and 1970s. Composers, painters, poets, designers they experimented their artworks merging, exploring, overlapping media, disciplines, art fields, and topics - it was their signature.
In addition, representatives of Fluxus were not only artists in a classic term, but economists, chefs, or mathematicians as well. However, experimental artists who were taking part in Fluxus events and activities had different ideas about Fluxus itself. In fact, they had diversified ideas about art and society as well. This diversity of ideas is a great reflection of art created by Fluxus. In order to bring the subject of sound art and fluxes, there is a pioneer artist, a composer who is well-known as an extraordinary composer who defines silence is part of music and sound and prove it a demonstration of playing 4’33’’ on stage with the piano soloist.
Cage affected on Fluxus extensively, in particular the performance of 4’33’’ in which the roles of silence and music were drastically changed. As well, the element of the viewer and unknown output like noise and ambient sound becomes the piece of art, in other words, the indeterminacy and uncertainty in art, could be available heavy part of the art by him. Member of Fluxus (including John Cage) emphasized the process than the finished projects or product.
“Everything we do is MUSIC” - John Cage
-Nam June Paik, interactive art
In terms of an explain the interactive media art we cannot be described without mentioning Nam June Paik (1932-2006). The Korean American artist is also considered as the pioneer of video art. In 1956, he moved to West Germany to continue his studies in the musicology Ph.D. program after he studied classic music. Although in the same year he switched to study composition in Freiburg Music Academy. Paik’s interests were focused on progressive music techniques. He was practicing and studying music at the same time.
At this point, Paik attended courses in Darmstadt where he met with Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, and George Maciunas. Inspired by Cage, Paik began to use everyday sounds and noise in his compositions. Inspired by Stockhausen’s electronic music, Paik began to study music concrete and the pioneer - Pierre Schaeffer. Influenced by these, without any doubt, composers with different backgrounds, the idea about music in general, and techniques, Paik created a new type of music - interactive art. After seeing John Cage’s Music Walk (1958), Paik presented his new piece dedicated to Cage Hommage a John Cage, Music for Tapes and Piano. This piece has three movements and lasts 10 minutes.
John Cage’s Water Walk
1. Background Study
-History of Sonic art.: John Cage and Fluxus and sonic art
Fluxus is an international and interdisciplinary artistic collective (or network) established in the 1960s and 1970s. Composers, painters, poets, designers experimented with their artworks merging, exploring, overlapping media, disciplines, art fields, and topics - it was their signature. In addition, representatives of Fluxus were not only artists in a classic term, but economists, chefs, or mathematicians as well. However, experimental artists who were taking part in Fluxus events and activities had different ideas about Fluxus itself. In fact, they had diversified ideas about art and society as well. This diversity of ideas is a great reflection of art created by Fluxus. In order to bring the subject of sound art and fluxes, there is a pioneer artist, a composer who is well-known as an extraordinary composer who defines silence is part of music and sound and proves it a demonstration of playing 4’33’’ on stage with the piano soloist.
Cage affected on Fluxus extensively, in particular the performance of 4’33’’ in which the roles of silence and music were drastically changed. As well, the element of the viewer and unknown output like noise and ambient sound becomes the piece of art, in other words, the indeterminacy and uncertainty in art, could be available heavy part of the art by him. Member of Fluxus (including John Cage) emphasized the process than the finished projects or product.
“Everything we do is MUSIC” - John Cage
-Nam June Paik, interactive art
In terms of an explain the interactive media art we cannot be described without mentioning Nam June Paik (1932-2006). The Korean American artist is also considered as the pioneer of video art. In 1956, he moved to West Germany to continue his studies in the musicology Ph.D. program after he studied classic music. Although in the same year he switched to study composition in Freiburg Music Academy. Paik’s interests were focused on progressive music techniques. He was practicing and studying music at the same time.
At this point, Paik attended courses in Darmstadt where he met with Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, and George Maciunas. Inspired by Cage, Paik began to use everyday sounds and noise in his compositions. Inspired by Stockhausen’s electronic music, Paik began to study music concrete and the pioneer - Pierre Schaeffer. Influenced by these, without any doubt, composers with different backgrounds, the idea about music in general, and techniques, Paik created a new type of music - interactive art.
After seeing John Cage’s Music Walk (1958), Paik presented his new piece dedicated to Cage Hommage a John Cage, Music for Tapes and Piano. This piece has three movements and lasts 10 minutes.
2. Concept and Aim
By studying the Fluxus movement, I think what is the purpose of the studying of that rather than emerging media artist, I should think about what I can catch the idea and philosophy to adapt to my work for today and the future. The Latin word Fluxus means flowing, in English, a flux is flowing out. To be honest, I always like their mind to create artwork more crashing and merging than a building, then re-build and create something new.
Trying to looking back days after the outbreak of the Covid19, music was a treatment to overcome the strange situation for me. Coincidentally, it wasn’t only me. A number of Journal and expert has started to publish about the influence of the music for mental care. Also, the lots of major and minor music and performance industries share their content via YouTube, and some celebrities over the world especially the US, organize and making community and using the digital platform to share their performance. After the development of the technology of streaming video service. People tend to “watch” the music rather than listening. Maybe it had begun a long time ago since MTV was there. And I think it more on to art field now as the time we cannot go to the gallery and museum. Fluxus founder Maciunas said that the purpose of Fluxus was to ‘promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art’. This has strong echoes of dada, the early twentieth-century art movement.
In terms of that, my aim is concentrating the visualizing the conceptual idea like music and sound. And focus on making web-based work or learning tools to make an app like Jave Script, Python.
3.Technical Approach and self-evaluation
Basically, my current work and idea come from webcam piano which based on computer vision and it is an interactive sound and video installation. I use a webcam to track an object by using Addons like ofxopenCV, ofxKinect, ofxPS3EyeGrabber, and ofxMaxim which I couldn’t figure it out how to manipulate and play and analyse music by ofxMaxim yet. (There were bunches of thread errors). So I turned into the screen as black and just focused on the poetic movement with the experiment how the value of a different number of threshold effects to the visual effect. And I use a simple particle system to pixels in the bufferFloat image are above a certain value. The debub mode draws small points. You want to have an else under that if statement which will make a call to the addParticle(x,y) of your particle system, passing it the coordinate where you want a particle generated.
4.Further development for next
I would like to keep this poetic style but I also develop it more interactively like combine more ideas and skills into VR or Machine Learning to embody it. Also, I will plan a few things to improve this current work in a different way. Firstly. I want to extend the size of work like bigger than human-sized. I was very inspired by the Messa di Voce (Performance) by Golan Levin. I usually work in big-sized video works and sometimes do performance so it would be a great collaboration. And adding my own video work to combine together for more aspect and message also wanting to use colorful tracking dots by using ofxGui addon.
Furthermore, I think the other key part of work can be the sound, I am concerned about what tool or which open frameworks would be good to fit my work. For instance, I started self-thought about max/MSP for the just in case for my work. Or I might use the constructed ambient sound that I made before form everyday-sound that I already collected and I may use Audacity to edit them. Maybe, I can change the tracking medium like leap motion or Arduino with a sensor. I think I need to narrow down the idea more with a possible idea I can run.
Reference
David Toop on Making Sound [online] Available at: https://youtu.be/-nYdsNqHo1g
David Toop (1995). Ocean of Sound, Serpent’s Tail
Mari Dumett(2017) Corporate imaginations- Fluxus Strategies for living, University of California Press.
Foundsoundscape.com. 2020. ( ( ( Foundsoundscape ) ) ) : Created & Curated By Janek Schaefer. [online] Available at:
Sonic Youth - Piano Piece #13 (for Nam June Paik) [online] Available at:https://youtu.be/hjbyN-IUUlA
John Cage's 4’33" [online] Available at: https://youtu.be/JTEFKFiXSx4
Nam June Paik - hommage a john cage [online] Available at: https://youtu.be/mSREMldyFtg
Hanna B. Holling(2017) Paik’s virtual archive - Time, Change, and Materiality in Media Art, University of California Press.
Scientists have turned the structure of the coronavirus into music By Vineeth Venugopal [online] Available at: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/scientists-have-turned-structure-coronavirus-music?fbclid=IwAR2Qz6PX5VYl1hL0jplakervZddJOK9FoFS2sHgaGOdnLJmN8HKhpgdITSc#
Ghost Pole Propagator II (2007, 2016) [online] Available at: https://vimeo.com/golanlevin/gpp2016
Messa di Voce (Performance) [online] Available at: http://www.flong.com/projects/messa/