joost rekveld:

Sonic Light 2003: Composing Light, Articulating Space

• programme 1: Hideout, Tuesday, 7:00PM
• programme 2: Hideout, Tuesday, 9:00PM
• programme 3: Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, Wednesday, 9:30PM

Last February saw the ninth edition of the Sonic Acts festival in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, under the name Sonic Light 2003. The festival comprised a week of film presentations, a three-day conference, a small exhibition and three evenings of live music and light projections in a space specially designed for this purpose -- the "Sonic Light Box". The central theme of the festival was the fascination held by artists for the creative possibilities offered by giving musical form to light and space.

The vision of a "music for the eye" is centuries old and forms an important undercurrent in the recent history of art and the new media: from the construction of the first colour organs and light sculptures and the first use of coloured lighting in theatre through abstract film animation and synthetic video images, to the design of interactive software to generate light and sound. The idea of a musical light art to be presented in an environment specially designed for that purpose becomes topical every time a new visual medium appears on the horizon. Among the present generation of computer artists a new type of visual music is being created that can be performed live or made specially for the Internet. Cinematexas presents three programmes that give an overview of the history of this field. This history includes many amazing works and individuals and is highly relevant for current developments in multi-media and the for the future of light and display technology. The programmes revolve around three themes: the relationship between film, kinetic art and light performance, the quest for a compositional approach to image and sound (including early experiments with electronic images for "experimental television") and works that focus on the nature and substance of light itself. The programme contains many films and videos that are very rarely shown. Joost Rekveld compiled these programmes and will introduce them.

programme 1: Luminodynamism

When film was still a new medium many artists were speculating about what would be the ultimate new film art. In the "absolute film," a term from the twenties, the combination of light and movement was seen as the essence of film. This movement was highly connected to the other new arts of the period, most notably to several artists in and around the German Bauhaus. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy taught there, developed many great ideas about film and became a big source of inspiration for many artists after him. Kurt Schwerdtfeger and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack developed a form of light performance at the Bauhaus, using a set-up of lights, filters and cut-out shapes behind a screen.

programme 2: Motion Graphics

This programme focuses on different approaches to the composition of images and sounds, the area where composing light is very close to composing sounds in music. It highlights two bodies of work: the work by John and James Whitney, and the slightly later work in synthetic video.

programme 3: Light

For a long time light was a mysterious action at a distance, a radiant kind of wind, something incorporeal, weightless, intangible and hyperfluid, something with the ability to move with incredible ease. The source of this radiant force is the sun, the human mind or ultimately God. In the Middle Ages an extensive light metaphysics was developed in which radiation was used as a metaphor for the way in which all kinds of causes and the power of God, in particular, was propagated in the world. A similar vocabulary can still be found in esoteric theories in which rays and luminous spheres figure in a similar way. In this programme films address this aspect of Light.