Monologue

“During the same period [late 1960s], we were taking the portable video equipment to New York’s cultural playgrounds: WBAI Free Music Store, Judson Church, La Mama, Automation House, the Village Vanguard, Fillmore East, Blue Dom, Kansas City Steakhouse, etc.… After such outings, everyone would gather in our loft to look at the instant playback – something that most people at that time had never experienced before. Even the word “video” was a brand-new addition to the vocabulary. By 1971 there was so much traffic our loft that, when a friend told us he had found a large space in an abandoned kitchen in the old Broadway Central Hotel, we were ready. The space was intended to serve the artists, not the audience. We therefore named it The Kitchen – LATL (Live Audience Test Laboratory).”

The Vasulkas

Investigate how sound and image can be generated from the same electronic source, making them feel interconnected.

I want to create a cyclical feedback ecosystem where sound modulates image and image modulates sound.

Like,
Video behaving like music,
Image is breathing.

Thomas Koner

With my music I am trying to construct a space that is as open and wide as possible without collapsing back upon itself; hardly any support columns or visible framework. There is a sense of emptiness, of lines that have been drawn but not completed.

Thomas Köner’s audiovisual work feels like entering a suspended landscape where time stretches and sound becomes a form of weather to me.

What attracts me is how inseparable the sound is from the imagery his visuals, don’t illustrate the sound but resonate with it.

With Koner, sound becomes geography, and the visuals become a portal into that vast sonic terrain.

the Vasulkas

Steina Vasulka & Woody Vasulka

I quote from Steina’s CV: “In these early years, Steina and Woody collaborated extensively on explorations into the electronic nature of video and sound, as well as documentaries about theater, dance, and music, with a particular interest in the New York underground scene. The Vasulkas relocated to Buffalo in 1974 to join the faculty of the State University of New York’s Center for Media Study. At this time, their interests diverged: Woody focused on the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor, and Steina explored with the camera as an independent imaging instrument for the Machine Vision series.”

UMU

Encountering the work of the Vasulkas is like experiencing the moment video and sound discover their raw.

Their pieces reveal the hidden architecture of media, turning the machinery of video into an expressive instrument.

What I love is how their sound and visuals seem to grow from the same source. You don’t feel like you are watching an image with sound layered on top. instead, both emerge from a single electronic heartbeat.

The Vasulkas remind me that sound can be structural, image can be musical, and technology can be poetic.

Pipilotti Rist

I saw her work ‘Lungenflügel’ in Tate, and was obsessed with it.

Her installations are frequently multi-sensory, they don’t just show video, but create environment. Encouraging the me to experience the work physically and emotionally rather than just watch it.

Sound becomes spatial in her works, shaping how I move and feel within the environment. Her work teaches me that audiovisual art can be tender, immersive, it’s an emotional landscape rather than a narrative.

Shigeko Kubota

Watching Shigeko Kubota’s Video Journal felt like entering an intimate diary where sound functions not as background, but as a pulse.

Unlike common video art, the sound often illustrates the visual field, Kubota’s soundscapes work more like inner monologues. They, the sounds give the visuals a psychological depth that might otherwise remain hidden.

Sound becomes a way of remembering, what was heard then, what she hears now, what she wants us to feel in the present.

I found myself noticing moments where the camera’s movement directly shapes the sound.

R x2 sound art work

This artwork is a computer algorithm collects data from the Internet on the force and depth of shocks in the planet’s crust, capturing all earthquakes greater than 0.1 Richter magnitude scale. On a typical day, there are up to 200 of these shocks. This data is turned into signals that operate the motors connected to the Thunder Drum acoustic drums.

I found myself admiring and have love of the piece. It made me appreciate how sound art often balances precision with vulnerability. The structure is solid, but the sounds it produces, as far as I can get, are ephemeral. That contrast feels profoundly poetic.

It doesn’t dictate how to listen only, it also opens possibilities.

It creates a sonic environment that is not just heard but inhabited.

It made me feel connected to the idea that sound art can be both conceptual and sensory.

Inhabit

You can make art out of anything

Betye Saar

My current idea of my first project is I wanna create and built a home place instruments’ collages, I will build a sculpture (like a real home place), but everything you can see in this is available to play sound tones and create your own music poems.

Here’s the draft of the innovative percussion Instruments I want to create:

And the draft of how’s whole installation looks like:

don’t know why, the image, all of my pics are unable to uploaded, and can’t access the media library. Will put these pictures in proposal document.

Playing sounds by shadowing

New-Century Instrument

Peter Vogel

Artwork: The Sound of Shadows Documentary

The artist Peter Vogel created an interactive structure The Sound of Shadows Documentary, which controlling and playing sounds by shadowing.

Can you say if this work can identified as a instrument? As it can be played sound when human playing it, can expresses melody lyrics, can cooperates with other instruments. As a music box.

as David mentioned in his book vs.Interpretation,

‘ Musicians don’t necessarily think of their instruments as technology, but they are. ‘

‘ And all the sound that come from the instrument are physically modeled digital sounds.’

You can understand, I understood the instruments as technology, it’s another way can indicate without words. Probably it’s better way to blow out own emotions than speaking in words, whatever positive or negative signs.

As far as I can see, the instruments, in any forms, pronating and louding hearable sounds.

everyone can play their own sound poems

I’m keeping wonder why’s most of the sound performances and exhibitions I saw are talking within noises more, can I create a thing that everyone will be able to play, to enjoy sound arts, but it’s in euphonic, dulcet expression.

The artist Harry Bertoia inspired me a lot, he is a sound art sculptor, his work is not built in complicated way, and everyone will enjoy to have a try.

As he said, while bending wire, Bertoia developed an interest in sound. The thin strand of metal, when it snapped and struck another wire, vibrated and generated sound. What would happen if combined these wires and created a symphony out of the striking of one wire against another?

This resulted in a number of sonics sculptures, works of art that reverberate when touched and moved. Betroia loved and thought that no musical education or knowledge was necessary for these sculptures. Bertoia considered himself to be somewhere in between a musician and a sculptor.

Why do you define synthesizers as ” horrible gadgets” , given that you are so receptive to the resources that modern technology offers on the Instruments level?

Because they’re not musical Instruments – something quite different. Maybe I exaggerate when I call them gadgets because they are very clever systems based on the voltage control of oscillators, which have simplified the switch from the old analogue techniques to the current, and highly evolved digital technologies.

One of the most alarming things about synthesizers is that they are not precise.

One of the most interesting is that they are not constructed on modular criteria, and are thus open, for better and for worse.

Two interviews, interview with Rossana Dalmonte, Luciano Berio

This interesting opinion pointed out by the musicologist Rossana Dalmonte in the book Two Interviews, interviewing by the composer Luciano Berio.

Which make me, myself start to think about What’s the instruments? How to define the instruments? Can I make sound out of anything as the instrument, as one of my favourite artist Betye Saar stated You can make art of anything?