Friday, August 10, 2012

We are by nature analogue beings

We are by nature analogue (def. "a continuous spectrum of values") beings, consisting of fluid organic substances. This is why my kinetic colours feel good in a visceral way and access our emotions; in contrast to digital images, synthesized from separate pixels. Those bits of separate information don't touch us emotionally, especially when viewed in digital projection. Which is why I bucked the trend, "reverting" to analogue overhead projectors with their continuous flow of light-colour. It's ironic that a spectator/audience will vaguely feel the difference without understanding why (cf. your observations on CDs).

In a different field, tourists will snap up art museum postcards with colours that are horribly wrong, without even noticing the difference to what they just saw in real space and with personal visual experience. The desperate longing for a souvenir, "in search of a lost emotion". For the same reason, people are always urging me to make commercial prints of my kinetic images, or at least DVDs, without realising that the "emotional involvement" in real time and space would be lacking, as would the awareness that you are witness to a creative act in real time.

Your references to Powick "Asylum", Elgar and LSD took me back. One of my first attempts at oil painting, as a first-year Birmingham art student in 1950, was of the view of the Asylum from Powick bridge. It had a strange fascination for me, as we biked a lot between Worcester and Malvern. Bizarre that, when teaching in Switzerland in the seventies, I lived just across the valley from "high priest" of LSD Timothy Leary. Just imagine how Elgar could be hyped up with psychedelia! Actually, I'm performing to Enigma Variations with the Bergen Phil. on September 6th., but my kinetic abstracts are a relatively soft drug. Although with Rotterdam Phil. last March, grown men were sobbing to the flow of my Nimrod.
That email was received from kinetic artist Norman Perryman in response to Time for music to awaken the inner analogue. Paths converge here with Norman's opening assertion that "We are by nature analogue beings, consisting of fluid organic substances" resonating strongly with Music exists only in constant flow and flux.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Strings sound better on LPs because you are hearing, at the point of delivery, what you would have heard live: amplified scraping. The bow and the needle scrape.