Images

Leon Theremin: Theremin Electronic Music Instrument 1919

Leon Theremin: Theremin Electronic Music Instrument 1919

Leon Theremin was a Russian scientist and inventor, who invented what was probably the first electronic instrument. He was inspired by the idea that free-form gestures could become musical instruments (when moved in the electrical field of his instrument), and he also invented installation technologies that responded to dancers. A prolific inventor (he developed the first passive listening device or bug), he was nevertheless imprisoned by Stalin in 1938. He was reinstated as a USSR citizen in 1956.

One of the first reactions to music that many of us experience is the mimicing of the act of conducting or of playing an instrument. Theremin capitalises on this in his ultimate air-guitar – a subtle and powerful instrument that responds to gesture. Along with his inventions of covert listening devices and motion-detectors as well as the Thereminovox, this makes Theremin the godfather of much intermedia and new media experimentation from the 1960s onwards. Versions of the Theremin were used to create the characteristic Startrek theme and Bob Whitsell’s Electro-Theremin featured in the Breach Boys’ Good Vibrations, and Wild Honey.

The gestural interface (to computers) has been an area of promising research since the late 1970s when Nicholas Negroponte’s ARCHMAC team demonstrated the Put That There! spatial-data management system – a gestural and voice interface. Theremin’s work was recognised by later electronic music innovators like Robert Moog. The gestural interface was illustrated brilliantly by Stephen Spielberg in his version of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report (2002)

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Marshmallow Laser Feast: Realtime Projection-mapping for Sony 2012

Marshmallow Laser Feast: Realtime Projection-mapping for Sony 2012

A brilliant creative team at the forefront of video projection-mapping and other realtime production special effects, Marshmallow Laser Feast had this to say about their work for Sony in 2012:

“We directed and produced 3 videos for the launch of the Sony PlayStation Video Store. Our job was to bring a living room alive with hints at various hollywood blockbuster franchises – so we decided to push projection mapping to a new level. We projection mapped a living room space with camera (or head) tracking and dynamic perspective. All content realtime 3D, camera (or head) is tracked to match and update the 3D perspective in realtime to the viewers point of view. Add to this real props, live puppetry, interaction between the virtual and physical worlds, a mixture of hi-tech and lo-tech live special effects, a little bit of pyrotechnics and a lot of late nights.”
http://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/82985/760212/home/sony-ps3-video-store-realtime-projection-mapping

Andre Kertesz: Distortion Series 1933

Andre Kertesz: Distortion Series 1933

Taking up photography at age 18, and being amongst the first unofficial war photographers till he was wounded in 1915, the Hungarian Kertesz moved to Paris in the 1920s and began photographing the artists and dancers there, exhibiting his work along with the likes of Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, Lisette Model and Philippe Halsman. In 1933, he was commissioned by the Parisian humour magazine La Sourire to take some nude photographs, and he employed a fun-house (fun-fair) distorting mirror to do this, returning to a theme of distortions that he had explored back in Hungary, shooting swimmers underwater. These delightful ‘surrealistic’ photographs are very much in the spirit of the time – Dali had painted ‘The Persistence of Memory’ with its melting distortions in 1931.

Gustav Klucis: postcard for Moscow Spartakiada 1928

Gustav Klucis: postcard for Moscow Spartakiada 1928

Gustav Klucis is among the four artists (also Hannah Hoch, Raoul Hausman, El Lissitzky) who claim to have invented the political photo-montage around 1918. His graphically sophisticated montages have more in common with modern graphic design than with art-agitprop, and there is no doubt that Klucis brought a considerable professional talent to his work for the Revolution. He became a professor of colour theory at the art school where he studied (VKhUTEMAS in Moscow), and developed multimedia designs for the Agitprop programme. Despite his loyalty to the Communist cause he was executed as a Latvian by Stalin in 1938. His wife and partner Valentina Kulagina only found out his fate in 1989.
Klucis is a one of the great early 20th century multimedia artists, with his wife Valentina Kulagina designing some of the most technically sophisticated photo-graphics of the period (ranking with Lazlo Moholy-Nagy’s photoplastics), and sketching and designing all kinds of rostrums and PA system stands for the AGITPROP education and propaganda programme.

In an era used to digital photo-montage and object-oriented graphic design software, its hard to understand just how difficult it was to produce this kind of integration of photography and graphics for the dominant letterpress printing technology of the time. The creation of halftone zinc plates from the original photographs, the cutting-out and trimming of these metal plates, and the mounting of halftone with line-block graphics on a type-high chunk of plywood, had none of the ease and fluidity of 21st century processes. The fact that they broke new ground integrating contemporary zeitgeist-design with photo-montage (although there are precedents by the Reutlinger Studio in the first decade of the 20th century) helps us ignore the technical crudity of the printed image, and recognise the brilliant innovations of Klucis, Rodchenko, the Stenberg brothers and others during this period of radical innovation.

Lou Reed + BBC Simon Hanhart: Such a Perfect Day 1997

Lou Reed + BBC Simon Hanhart: Such a Perfect Day 1997

Broadcast initially as a BBC promotional video, illustrating the diversity of music and the quality of their music coverage, this video was so successful that it was co-opted for use in the BBC Save the Children Charity appeal and used to promote the charity single of A Perfect Day, raising nearly £2.25 million. I was at AMX Digital – a multimedia design studio in central London, and on behalf of Apple Computer, we had a copy of the broadcast quality taped video and were tasked with testing the quality of a Quicktime Sorensen compression algorithm on the video, so that it could be played online at the extremely limited bandwidth available to most people at this time. Supervised by AMX’s Alastair Scott, the Quicktime version was great, and illustrated for me the mutability of the digital media rapidly becoming mainstream.

Thinkmap: Visual Thesaurus 1997

Thinkmap: Visual Thesaurus 1997

The first in a wave of java-encoded visualisation software that revealed the power of live computation to arrange text-data in a meaningful visualisation of their relationships, Thinkmap’s Visual Thesaurus was a revelation to all of us working at the cutting edge of design and technology. In 1997, I was at AMX Studios, working with the designer Malcolm Garrett on a book called Understanding Hypermedia 2.000, and the AMX lead designer Maxine Gregson showed me the Visual Thesaurus. It was a revelation – a superb synthesis of design and software, functional, fun and funky at the same time.

Peter Mark Roget completed his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases in 1852, having begun work on compiling a list of words linked by the same idea as early as 1805.

“The Visual Thesaurus is a 3D interactive reference tool, powered by Thinkmap, that gets students of all ages excited about words. Using our visualization technology, the Visual Thesaurus takes a unique, and remarkably beautiful, approach to presenting the results of a word lookup.
The Visual Thesaurus creates an animated display of words and meanings — a visual representation of the English language. The Thinkmap visualization places your word in the center of the display, connected to related words and meanings. You can then click on these words or meanings to explore further.”(Thinkmap)

Frederic Vavrille’s delightful (2005) early interface for his LivePlasma recommendation engine (top), obviously based on the same software principles as the Visual Thesaurus, brought colour and multi-media – pictures, audio-tracks, links to video (etc)

Karel Capek/; Rossum’s Universal Robots (RUR) 1921

Karel Capek/; Rossum's Universal Robots (RUR) 1921

Karel Capek published Rossum’s Universal Robots in 1921, simultaneously inventing the word Robot, and creating a science-fiction tradition in Czechoslovakia. Robot is derived from the Czech Robota – which can mean work you don’t really want to do, or work that is tedious. His play has been performed around the world, and the word Robot was subsequently made really famous by Isaac Asimov in the 1940s (stories collected as I Robot 1950).

In 1938, the BBC’s nascent Television Centre produced a version of RUR (picture below).

Also in 1938, Richard Buckminster Fuller in his book Nine Chains to the Moon, describes a man as:
“A self-balancing, 28-jointed adapter-base biped; an electro-mechanical reduction-plant, integral with segregated stowages of special energy extracts in storage batteries, for subsequent actuation of thousands of hydraulic and pneumatic pumps, with motors attached; 62,000 miles of capillaries; millions of warning signal, railroad and conveyor systems; crushers and cranes (of which the arms are magnificent 23-jointed affairs with self-surfacing and lubricating systems, and a universally distributed telephone system needing no service for 70 years if well managed); the whole, extraordinarily complex mechanism guided with exquisite precision from a turret in which are located telescopic and microscopic self-registering and recording range finders, a spectroscope, et cetera, the turret control being closely allied with an air conditioning intake-and-exhaust, and a main fuel intake.”

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1938 BBC Television  produce RUR as a tv play

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Early 1920s – an early production of the play RUR.

By the 1940s the word Robot was popularised world-wide by the American sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov, who writes a series of books featuring advanced robots including I, Robot, and invents his Three Laws of Robotics. During the period 1950-2000, robots went from fiction to fact, a causal chain perhaps beginning with Grey Walter’s Tortoise autonomous robots in 1949. Coeval with Robotics, the science of artificial intelligence (including machine-vision, machine reasoning, voice-recognition, speech synthesis, Turing-test programming, software agents, etc etc) developed and splintered into a variety of sub-specialisms. From the late 1940s, we have another parallel and overlapping science – that of cybernetics – ‘command and control in man and the machine’ (Weiner 1948). It was the convergence and synergetic outcome of these three disciplines (robotics, AI and cybernetics) that put us on the road to the eventual  creation of what Hans Moravec calls an ultra-intelligent machine.

In 2013 alone, 179,000 industrial robots were sold worldwide.

 

Storm de Hirsch: Peyote Queen 1965

Storm de Hirsch: Peyote Queen 1965

Storm de Hirsch was a mature artist when she made her first feature – Goodbye in the Mirror, shot on 16mm – in 1963. Born in 1912, she was five years older than the doyenne of the American avant garde, Maya Deren. And de Hirsch, like Deren, was an experimentalist, with a background as a painter and a poet. Many of her short films she made are abstract, some are made without a camera – with de Hirsch scratching, painting and etching directly onto film, sometimes using multi-screen prints, some with in-camera masking or matting.
The best biography of this under-appreciated film-maker is at http://www.filmdirectorssite.com/storm-de-hirsch

What makes artists and film-makers like Storm de Hirsch important in the back-story of 21st century media? Because the avant garde were the first to seize the opportunity of new media to explore new ways of communicating and expressing their ideas. There is a techno-aesthetic exploring the areas of synaesthesia, immersion, interactivity, and multi-sensory communication that permeates the recent history of our culture, from the Phantasmagoria of the early 19th century to the immersive, multi-sensory, multi-media forms of the Happening and Dance Rave culture of the 1990s, but this desire of artists to enrapture their audience must be traced back to the neolithic – to the primordial dance-ritual, storytelling, oral culture of pre-history.

Peyote Queen was made when abstract expressionism was just giving way to pop art as the dominant fine-art form. De Hirsch nods towards both styles, but is suffused throughout by a celebration of the primitive – of percussion, abstraction, symbolism (the ankh, the cross, the crescent, the yin-yang) as well as simple punched holes, scratched graffito of lips, tits, hearts, eyes, flowers, and the evocative kaleidoscopic effects of distorting mirrors, dimpled glass, prisms, and the organic distorted close-ups of faces, hands, drumming. The sound track is jazzy, percussive, Caribbean, burlesque, and the movie is cut on the beat (or having that effect).

Winsor McCay: Little Nemo in Slumberland 1910

Winsor McCay: Little Nemo in Slumberland 1910

Winsor McCay had already established his reputation as a comic-strip artist with his creation of Little Nemo in Slumberland  – an art nouveau comic strip reproduced in full colour and syndicated around the world – when he began to extend and enhance his drawings into animated films, live lectures and stage performances with projected images. McCay’s storytelling genius – the seemingly endless variations of what happened every night between Little Nemo falling asleep and waking up in the morning – is revealed in this masterpiece of visual narrative – his ‘framing’ just beginning to reflect the innovations in lenses and cinematography introduced in the previous decade or so. Look at the page above – the storyboard-cinematographic framing and styling, even the colour gel ‘tints’ used to colour monochrome frames – all reveal how much McCay was aware of the explosion of imagery he was witnessing at the end of the Belle Epoque.

His very original conversion of Little Nemo to an animated film (1911) is a landmark in the history of animation. McCay combines live-action, over-the-shoulder live-action drawing, frame by frame animation, cell-colouring and captions in this lively essay on the art of drawing animation. McCay’s Art Nouveau style was not a great commercial success – his American immigrant audience preferring The Katzenjammer Kids, and other rough and tumble slapstick strips like The Brady Boys. But the standards of drawing, colouring and animation set by McCay, make him immortal. McCay stands out above all other comic artists, for his delightful and quintessential Art Nouveau drawing and colouring, but it is the imaginative animation that inspires. Like Norman McLaren some 30 years later, McCay is not afraid to improvise and innovate. In Little Nemo, he combines frame-by-frame drawing, live drawing to camera, live action, colour and caption – mixing these styles to both capture the magic of animation, and hinting at his stage performances to be developed fully in 1914 with his Gertie the Dinosaur shows. The breakdown of the audiences’ cognitive framework – their suspension of disbelief – by revealing the technique of the animator and illustrator, is McCay’s original contribution to the history of animation.

 

 

Frank Miller + Robert Rodriguez: Sin City 2005

Frank Miller + Robert Rodriguez: Sin City 2005

This is one of the best remediations of a comic-strip to date. Rodriguez and Miller, with ‘guest director’ Quintin Tarantino, construct a computer-generated 3d world inspired by Miller’s original drawings, perspectives, camera movements and framing, that echo Miller’s visual-narrative style, and screen characters that subtly blend the talents of the actors with the visual drawing-style of Miller, and integrate all these elements together with ‘spot colour’ and film-noir black and white…

Miller has all the draftsmanship talents of the great originators of the modern comic – especially Will Eisner, whose character The Spirit occupies similar laconic underworld story-space as those of Frank Miller.