Diolch yn fawr iawn am wylio'r fideo. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Tekstet av Nicolai Winther I'm sorry. Hello Hello and welcome to the last day of Prius Electronica 2021. Welcome to the panels of Synesthetic Syntax, Seeing Sound, Hearing Vision vision part of the expanded animation symposium so this is our third day and we are streaming since the second day of ours electronica we have a very great panel today really brilliant presentations will follow and it will be an exciting program for the next nine hours. It's great that we have the synesthetic syntax conference the second time. We came up with this idea of this very interesting intersection of animation and sound. Last year when we and Pegitta talked about this expanded field seeing a very interesting discussion going on with Prius Electronica's category computer animation and digital sound as well so this is a collaboration synesthetic syntax with the university of Farnham, Begitta Hosea and Harry Weil. It's great to have them here. And before we will switch to London to them, I will briefly introduce this fantastic day, the program. Of course, due to the pandemic, it is again, like last year, an online conference. The hub for this online event is the Campus Hagenberg. But unfortunately, we have no audience here. You are the audience and you can watch the stream and also the recorded videos on our YouTube channel, expandedanim dot-com so we will start with the first panel in this field of soon aesthetic syntax a return to the material we will have a short break and then we will continue with the preform computer animation preform is the place where the Golden Nika winner this year, it is Kuan Liu, will talk about his project and also the award of distinction winners. Eric O. will talk about his piece Opera and also Veneta Androva. Moderator will be Helen Starr. She was part of the Prius Electronica Shuri category computer animation. After the pre-forum, we will continue with hearing color, seeing sound. And the last panel will be in front of your ears and eyes. And we will close with the keynote. We are very privileged to have Refik Anadol as a keynote speaker, giving a keynote on this topic. And this will be, so to speak, the final presentation of the Expanded Animation Symposium and Synesthetic Syntax Conference. So it's great to have Birgitta and Harry Vale with us and we will now connect them to London. Hello everybody and warm welcome from University for the Creative Arts and welcome to today's Synesthetic Syntax Symposium. With this series of symposia, so this is the second one we're doing, we're really exploring how animation is felt through sensory information that's processed by the body this year and last year we did that with a focus on the relationship between hearing and seeing and this relationship has been around since the very very early days of cinema so for example for example walter ruttmann said the music of light has always been and will remain the essence of cinema so there's been this connection between music and light right from the beginning of the moving image but our intention is to go beyond superficial connections between sound and animated images, to think about how the senses are engaged and thus the central role of the body in engaging with perception and experience. And this is influenced by philosopher Molu Ponte, who argues that synesthesia, in other words, the connection and cross wiring of all the senses is at the root of perception, how we understand the world that we live in. that we bring into the computer from all different kinds of sense outputs, touch and sound and smell can all be expressed in a common language of zeros and ones. So part of our premise is that the computer is inherently synesthetic. And in thinking about the senses and the body, we're also responding to these peculiar times of pandemic, when so much of our interactions have been mediated through a screen, and we're no longer directly experiencing the world. to our themes in different ways and I do hope you find all of the talks today thought-provoking and inspiring. And now I'll pass over to Harry Wally. Hi Harry. Thank you Birgitta, nice to see you and as well likewise Jürgen, thank you for that introduction. I'm going to be introducing the first panel today and your introduction there, Birgitta, made me think about Ada Lovelace and what she would have made of the synesthetic computer made in zeros and ones. I think she probably would have been on board with you there. But maybe that's something that might come up for a little bit of debate later on with one of these speakers in particular talking about the difference between analog and digital continuous and non-continuous sort of forms of representing the world so uh i'll just give a quick headline of each one of our three uh then uh we'll uh get uh sort of moved across to the presentations themselves. Afterwards, I'll host a Q&A. And if you're on Zoom or watching this stream, please feel free to add any questions or comments, and we'll pick those up and add those into the conversation. So although we can't see you stick your hand up in real life, you can still put a virtual wave and a question and comment. And they're really welcome. Any type of comment you want to make or question or clarification, we'll try our best to add those into the conversation as we go. So the first speaker, Dirk de Bruin, is Associate Professor of Screen and Design at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, where it's probably the middle of the night, where he teaches animation and documentary animation, with a career both as a researcher and creator of animation stretching over 40 years. In this presentation, he will explore traumatic forms of remembering that draws upon multiple and various production strategies. From screen experiments of the 1980s in suburban Melbourne to projection and light performances from the first part of the current century, and most recently, 360 degree projections and installations, including full dome projections. A sort of continuum of further and greater levels of immersion related to this important topic of traumatic remembering. Followed by that, Alberto Novello's practice repurposes found and decontextualized analog devices to investigate the connections between light and sound in the form of contemplative installations and performances. He repairs and modifies tools from our past, oscilloscopes, game consoles, analog video mixers and lasers. He is attracted by their absence of frame rate and the fluid beam movement that all of those devices have. Using these forgotten or not so forgotten devices, he explores to the public the aesthetic differences between ubiquitous digital projections and the vibrancy of analog beams. Finally, Dr Lily Husbands, who is a lecturer in animation and visual culture at Middlesex University in the UK. Her research is broadly concerned with the legacy and evolution of experimental animation in the context of contemporary multimedia practice. experimental animation in the context of contemporary multimedia practice. In a presentation, Visible Vibrations, Stephen Woolisham's Direct Animation and Jazz, Dr Husband investigates the complex interaction between direct animation of music, taking examples from jazz, but also contrasted with classical music. So I look forward to seeing you for the Q&A and panel discussion later on. And in the meantime, please join us for those three presentations. Okay, thank you for coming to listen to my presentation about traumatic forms of remembering. I've mapped here my expanded animation practice into three phases from 1980 plus, analogue 16 mil material seminar film 2000 plus mapping the digital analog divide addressing trauma and its layered anti narratives 2020 360 degree digital technologies, peripheral vision and immersive technologies. So for part one, the two screen experiments, experiments, which was the main work that came out of that phase documented the numbing qualities of urban spaces in suburban Melbourne and their impact on family life. The eyes were attacked with abrupt pixelated visual shifts as flicker and after images. Chants were transformed into manifesto-like delivery, repetitive sonic performances, voice. I was interested in driving the audience into catatonia, overwhelmingly. Experiments, experiments, the two-screen 50-minute work was constructed with strategically positioned ambiguities. A Buddhist chant was turned into an angry scream. A how-to film book into a fairy story. A breathing mantra into stuttering sound poetry. This sample narrative was framed through martial occluence theorizing about probes, pattern recognition, and information speed up. The texts within them were manifesto-like. These performances and their visuals were driven and constructed around the sonic qualities of the spaces in which they were performed. Technically this first phase concerned working through and linking artisanal analog technologies, using home processing, scratching on film. This included working professionally in a film lab for myself, for my good self, which allowed experimentation by allowing me to process at home with discarded chemicals or spent chemicals, spent chemicals to experiment with solarization by torching the film with colored filters while the film was being processed in the processing machine creating solarizing effects with different colors and making my own time lapse machine by coupling a windscreen wiper motor to a cine special camera it all had to be done on the cheap. There was also the developing dialogue between the two screens that were part of the language itself, which evolved into laying screens over the top of each other during projection, masking parts of the image with my hands, placing filters and prisms in front of the projector lens and adding sound poetry to the live performance. So this work developed, and you'll see some of this shortly, this work developed a disruptive sampling language which created disturbances against the art of looking at narrative film. This was understood as an echo of the art looking at the landscape in the speed of a train and this situation that happened with the Industrial Revolution where looking out of a speeding train was not something that had to be learned. That speed broke down the ability to construct the same narratives available to the walking stroller, bike rider or coach traveller. The body had to learn to form a decentered looking and sampling to string together the blurs that pass the train window. This was initially a traumatic perceptual shift that had to be learned over to accommodate new technological situations. One of the kind of instances I had when I started performing this work was at a Victoria Art Gallery in Dordrecht. The audience actually complained for me masking the image of parts of the image because they wanted to see everything where I was kind of about denying things and putting that in. This approach was, my approach was very artisanal. It was related to, in a sense, to my parents, my father's bricklaying and my mother's seamstress work. The steam beck and the cement and tape splice that became my sewing machine. Also, there was an unsettled anger in these performances. You know, the idea of working class resistance is present in this reappropriation of a John Lennon song, God, for example, from the album Working Class Hero, manifesto-like, his ode to the worship of false gods. My list included all the things that I loved and resisted in cinema. God, please, end my death! This included all the things that I loved and resisted in actors. Don't believe in speeches. Don't believe in objectivity. Don't believe in script. Don't believe in lipstick. Don He believes in the dog. He believes in the dog. Chris Bruin's conception of situational verbally accessible memory provided an important framework for my evolving visual thinking about what could be seen and what not, what is narrative, what is understood and what is not understood. The following texts outline the different characteristics of these memory systems. Simply put, VAM relates to narrative and storytelling and SAM to body-centered knowledge, often fragmented and deeply embedded and denied. These dual screen performances honed in on the unspoken, the hidden and often unlocatable memories that were often invoked during the performance in my body. I tried to locate and communicate states of mind. Its ambiguous messages were probes into situational accessible memory. uh this second phase opened up as a response to digital projection which was brought which brought image manipulation to the forefront through filters available in image editing applications. Lev Manovich had argued that the avant-garde was domesticated inside the computer's film editing software which migrated malignant image manipulation from the sonic constructions of piano and keyboard and organ to the fingertips of the computer keyboard. Interesting, these first performances of this second phase emerged out of an interest from the sonic sound communities in Australia. The digital made redundant the physical effects of image manipulation of my analog practice which now became possible in post-production for everyone with access to an array of editing applications like After Effects and Premiere Pro which I noted before. You know as I already noted Chris Berwyn's conceptualizations on traumatic memory through a disturbed dialogue between verbally accessible memory and situation accessible memory was important to the framing of my performances which addressed or presented overwhelming experience in both sound and image. The immersive quality of this performance practice allowed situational accessible memory in my body to emerge as a fashion relatable, in a fashion relatable, to my Darren's investigation of Hey Do Voodoo Dance. Straddled between digital and analog, my performance practice evolved into a critical response to digital surface. Phil and Flusser argued that the proliferation of technical images was amnesic. Technical digital images was amnesic as we lost the knowledge of knowing where these images came from. These physical performances were designed to show how these visual effects were materially produced to make available where these images came from. It became important to show physically and materially through manipulation of the apparatus what were the invisible mechanics of image projection inside the computer? The audience was asked to look at the image fields moving around the walls, but also to watch the physical operations I was imposing on the projectors. The projector mechanics were as important as what appeared on the screen in the four walls. A quick list of interventions. These interventions included hand and body to silhouette and mask the image, which extended what I was doing in the first phase. Small mirrors to redirect the image around the performance space by changing the angles and blurring the image. Swiveling projector bases to also move the image's direction, using power regulators to speed and slow down the projectors, and they also used prisms to warp and multiply the images on the walls. Strobic torches were used to create other dynamic imagery in shadow and light. When directed at the optical sound reader on the projector, they added sound pulses to the sound landscape. The immersive quality of abuse and trauma came into focus in this critique of the invisible in the night as these performances accumulated. This immersive process also enabled the resurfacing of abuse inside my own body, sexual abuse I had suffered at the hands of my aunt and paternal grandmother as a small child. These layers evolved into body performances and the utterance of sound poetry to drive the flicker and manipulating events from both digital projector and analog 16 objector. The second phase of work was kind of framed or informed by Phil and Flusser's idea of the freedom of the migrant and his concept of the technical image and marked a dialogue between analog and digital forms. I understood my migration from old to new technologies as an echo replay rehearsal of my parents' physical migration from the old word Europe to the new world Australia in the 50s. The performance at Ponte Irea, ZKM in Kararua, an impact festival in the Utrecht became important as I understood the location of the roots of my practice there, where my guttural moans, stutterings and inflections contained within them traces of the Dutch accent I was born with, which was erased out of my body with my migration and integration into Australian culture from eight years on. I consequently experienced Australia as a culture of erasure and denial from within which my formal practice and interest in formalist structures first emerged. But such an essential cinema was not enough. Just as James Bennet used Robert Hewitt's postcard, which stated, less is more, but it's not enough. I also understood this as an insight to Benning's move through formalism, but it also stated where I was working when I started to kind of, these memories that come and are being re-invoked within my own practice. it took on of these memories to come and being re-invoked within my own practice. It became clear through this performance that I was also uttering my mother and father's post-war pain which they brought from Europe to Australia. I could see that in the exhibition at Karlsruhe in an exhibition at post-war art curated by Peter Weeble Kunst in Europa 1945-68, Kunst in Europa 1945-68, I saw myself performing the fragmented aesthetics of European post-war visual art in my multi-projected performances that emerged immediately into the Second World War. In the Australian environment up to that point, I had to develop, in which I had to develop my arts practice, created a new tension and ambiguity that was denied, erased, it was not recognised or understood in Australia. The war pain was monumentalised as an heroic Anzac myth rather than the body-centred trauma my parents had unwittingly passed on to me and magnified by migration really. Willem Flusser's understanding of the freedom of the migrant became important to this research. His point is that rather than sitting in your bedroom on a computer grazing from one part of the world to another, within the migrants body, such dislocation and movement is experienced directly in all the senses and remained etched for good and died inside the body as situational accessible memory, invisible to daily life, but invoking its pain at all sorts of opportunities. Terima kasih telah menonton Okay, phase three, 360 degree projections installations. 360 degree projections installations. Where the first face had me in front of the screen and the second inside the projection and sonic space, in this third space, the artist is removed from the 360 degree projection space altogether to be replaced by the viewer inside this space. Or within a virtual reality, wearing goggles, 3D goggles. Rotunda, a full dome project screened at the International Full Dome Festival in Jenner last year, moved the immersive projections of the second phase into a standalone immersive digital form, using the voice of media artist Marissa Steroper and sound poetry of a punk musician partner Frank Lavesey. This 360 degree project translated the languages developed in the live fragmented anti-narrative performances performances of the second phase into a contained and mobile digital media form. He thought well, well constructed, well said, said it all. Beautiful language. said it all beautiful language this third phase includes a response to the covid lockdown which has been extreme in melbourne triggering a hyper vigilance response by collecting gathering time lapse imagery of the local port philip bay area and terry's national park. Terrix contains the last vestiges of native grasslands in the rural Victoria. The top example pans across a megapixel image of a college football match. Interestingly though the pan is slow and consistent, when viewed as a circular image within a 360 degree circular image within a 360 degree space, it invokes a strong sense of vertigo and motion sickness. 360 degree projection spaces like Full Dole migrates the impact on the body of these immersive environments from the performer to the viewer into an unexpected intimate body centered form which had motored my interest in life-expanded animation performance during that second phase. This new research has included the use of time-lapse to contemplate horizon lines, Port Phillip Bay, in seascape environments and documenting of sonic traces of historic Indigenous occupation of rural landscapes now erased and rendered invisible. This phase offers a response also to surveillance capitalism by exploring and mapping durational landscape settings and exploring details and artefacts in the landscape, like wind, water, birds, movement, and subtle changes in light during the day that tend to remain outside the reach of those new unprecedented capitalist surveillance machines. So thank you for your attention. I'll finish there and your interest. I'll leave you with four of the links for the performance documents that have been sprinkled through the presentation. Thank you. Alberto Novello Hello. My name is Alberto Novello. I'm professor of electronic music and new media at the Conservatory of Padua in Italy, and audiovisual performer. In my artistic practice, I repurpose, found or decontextualize analog devices to investigate the connections between light and sound in the form of contemplative installations and performances. I use repaired or modified tools from our analog past, oscilloscopes, early game consoles, analog video mixers, and lasers. In this article, after a brief contextualization and definitions, I will propose my personal answers and practical contribution to the question raised by this call about synesthesia, the connectivity of sound and vision, and the return to materialism. and the return to materialism. Despite its precise definition in the art world, the word synesthesia has been wildly misused and drifted from its original definition to identify any multi-modal sensory experience such as a live cinema or a VJ show. In the most common situation, synesthetic art connecting sound and vision is often defined as visual music. An official definition of visual music as an art form is still somehow debated and unclear. However, in the last decade several worldwide exhibitions have been inspired by the idea of connecting sound and light under the common name of visual music. Jack Ox and Cindy Kiefer that curated one of the largest exhibitions of visual music, condensed the works into four categories. The translation of a piece of music into images, usually defined as intermedia. A time-based narrative with a visual structure, where light movements are intended as music events and distributed over time, with or without sound. A visual composition created in a linear way following a time development but rather static, as on canvas, the direct no interpretative translation of images to sound or vice versa, what you hear is exactly what you see. While the first three definitions leave some arbitrary choice on how to connect sound and image, I'll focus on the last one for this paper. It is an objective and somehow strict definition and I think there is some gain from proceeding in this direction. A starting approach of visual music could be found already in the Greek philosophers, with Pythagoras in his theory of proportions, in Plato's Themaeus, and in Aristotle with the first theory of correspondence between sound and color. But it's with Newton's optics that the systematic re-experimentation started in Europe, that led to the creation of several instruments for the simultaneous control of sound and light, the clavecin oculaire, or color organs, which culminated with the cybernetic music color machine conceived by Gordon Paske, and eventually the modern computers. music color machine conceived by Gordon Paske and eventually the modern computers. The early experimental films from the last century were always based on a clear connection between moving image and sound, but it's with Marie-Hélène Butte and Ben Leposki that the same signal was transmitted untranslated to the speaker to create sound and the deflective coils of monitors to create images, what Butte called seeing sound. In the 60s, the invention and diffusion of audio synthesizers boosted the creation of video synthesizers, and the work of Steiner and Buri Basulka explored this concept even further. The digitalization and reproducibility brought by computers took the attention of humanity for a few decades, However, now, maybe to diverge from ubiquitous digital projection or craving a return to materiality, several artists move back towards the old tools that we forgot on the shelves in the 70s, attracted by digital machines. This is not an isolated phenomenon. The fascination towards the 70s happens in literature, photography, and music too. To create analog art, one has to find, repair, and understand the working mechanism of these old tools. It is an interesting process, described very well and supported theoretically by media archaeology. Media archaeology interprets current human technology and emerging media through an analysis of the past, in particular by attempting to criticize the common narratives of a linear and deterministic progress of the evolution of human technology. Every discontinuity in history creates new ideas, a paradigm shift, and, as a consequence, the rejection of old ways of thinking and old tools that inevitably become dead media. Media archaeology widens the temporal scope of every object considering its environmental implication, realizing that old media never lives. It either resurfaces as toxins in the soil or it is reinterpreted and reutilized becoming zombie media, not alive but also not dead. Furthermore, new technology is conceived as black box. We can't repair, only substitute parts. A phenomenon that is one of the premises at the base of planned obsolescence. Opposed to these ideas, a growing group of philosophers, artists, environmentalists, historians advocate for a retrospection of materiality. What can we do with old tools in an overpopulated area in which recycling becomes essential? Where most of the products we need are designed with planned obsolescence by corporations? The history of music is dense with individuals developing or readapting past technology in new forms. Do-it-yourself culture, hardware hacking and circuit bending are based on repurposing old media for new lives and artistic purposes. This raises questions about our technology and how we should approach it critically. If we inspect our history we can easily see how most of our technological tools are not neutral but often come from the military. Art has often misappropriated these to transform their function in something more social. A classic example is the case of the M7 machine developed by the US Army to target our flights, and used by John Whitney to create animation for the opening scene of Vertigo. The same extends to the internet, GPS sensors, radars, computers, monitors, projectors, and the internet itself. Most of the technology we use in art was created with destruction and death in mind. That's why we can go as far as quoting Gustav Metzger saying that the real avant-garde is the army. The fascination towards the past might have started with the steampunk, reimagining time, mixing future and past, but also in music with the re-emergence of vinyls and audio synthesizers, in video art with a return to old CRT screens. Hardware hacking is an economic way to create new sounds from junk and circuit vendors create vintage instruments from items purchased in garage sales. In particular there is a fascination with the old aesthetics, big buttons, strange colors and shape, a materiality that seems again fresh compared to the minimalism of PCs that are as revealed in the 2000s not so entertaining on stage. We want to see something being used and performed with, different from what we have on our desk for eight hours per day. We need materiality for a better performativity. Social media boosted this interest towards the past. Communities and forums formed to exchange information on tools, practices, share manuals and parts, create reparation tutorials and sharing new old art. The work of Marie Ellen Butte and Leposki emerge again. And like that the work of Lazarists Ronald Pellegrino and Elsa Garmayer return to be interesting again through the work of Robin Fox, Robert Henke and Edwin van der Heide. I give here a few examples of contemporary artists that go in this direction, creating time machines that don't belong to any era anymore. With CBM 8032, Robert Henke explores the beauty of simple graphics and sound, using computers from the early 80s. It's interesting as the author notes everything presented within the project could have been done already in the 80s, but it needed the cultural backdrop of today to come up with artistic ideas driving it. Carl Klomp, Tom Verbrugge and Gijs Gijske create hybrid digital analog totems of devices scattered on floors, feeding signals into each other. Wouter van Veldoven works with old analog tape recorders, creating network sculptures of tapes feeding back into each other, ranging from noise to techno. Crack the Ray Tube is a duo by Kyle Evans and James Connolly. They share workshops and tutorial on how to hack your TV set to display sound or become a hybrid analog digital glitch machine impossible to achieve with only digital simulation. with only digital simulation. At the base of my art is media archaeology, resurrecting old tools from the past. I am attracted to the different aesthetics of these devices compared to the digital projections. Fluid beam movement, vivid colors, infinite resolutions, absence of frame rate and line aesthetics. This choice helps me to differentiate my practice from the mainstream of digital computer art. The functioning mechanism of old CRT monitors is simpler and limit my possibility. Accepting only three signals, x, y and intensity, they force the artist to think in a different way. For simplicity, thus immediacy in live performance, and coherence, I chose to work with a hard wire synesthesia, when the same untranslated signal is sent to deflect a light beam to create images and to drive the coil of allowed speakers which convert these signals into sound. I embrace the expressive limitations in favor of the intrinsic gain coherence, avoiding any arbitrary juxtaposition of image and sound by the artist. Computer algorithms often need to set too many parameters. We might have infinite control but that might result in infinite tweaking time. Simple designs, few parameters allow for faster response. A good example is a car. We have only few controls under our forelimbs to react quickly and instinctively to avoid accidents. In a similar way, for a live performance I need to access quickly my few signals to control the image, and I had to learn how to do it instinctively. I also had to learn to think the designing of sound and image simultaneously. Enveloping the audience in synchronous sound and light information reveals visually the underlying sound properties and geometries of sound, exposing to the eyes what is sometimes obscure for the ears. I call this process visual listening, a deeper way of understanding sound through its visualization through light. Often sound, especially at low frequency, becomes also a tactile phenomenon, almost a body massage. In this case, three senses are stimulated simultaneously. After show, audience feedback confirmed that the simultaneous stimulation of both aural and visual senses also manifested in tactile sensations sensations even in the case of high frequencies. Because of the perfect audiovisual synchronization the audience instantaneously understands the roots of play and enjoys the limitations and risks taken by the artist. I think of my practice as a continuation of the research led by Oscar Fischinger, Lapooski and Marie-Hélène Butte, and the Vassoulkas, combining different light sources, lasers and CRTs, but also developing algorithms thanks to digital precision that was unknown before. By using these forgotten devices, I exposed the public to the aesthetic differences between the ubiquitous digital projections and the vibrance of analog beams, engaging them to reflect on the socio-political impact of technology, in a retrospective of technologization, what old means and what value the new really adds. Beside the analog aesthetics, I also consider the environmental impact of the charm of repurposing obsolete devices as an archaeological media. Do we digest new technology or we have a short attention span and we jump from invention to invention without harnessing the full potential of what we create? I also find fascinating the different aesthetics this old bulky machine possess and find it liberating not to have to acquire the last expensive super machines to create art that only big studios can afford. This famous picture shows us the relationship between technology, hype and money. One can choose to be the artist that uses the latest technology. In general this requires fast computing machines and a series of connections, funds, curators, places to show the work. This type of work in general aim at large scale installations. Or one can choose to buy technology when it's out of fashion and rethink slowly what has not been done yet with it. The choice of simple solutions has strengthened my practice during the pandemic. Laser light is coherent light so it concentrates eye power in a single dot. The brain interprets its movement into lights and lines into shapes. The power of laser makes it a very efficient light beam requiring often less than a watt to be visible for hundreds of meters. Recent laser technology evolved so quickly and created portable projectors that cost a fraction of the price of a digital one. And during COVID lockdown, I used this advantage to create impromptu laser shows for my neighborhood on the rooftop of my city in Italy, to entertain the audiences on the balconies when walking in the street was not allowed. A simple act that unified people from their own homes. I do not discard digital art and embrace a hybridization by combining the advantages of both worlds, the fluidity and vibrancy of colors of analog light beams and the precision and replicability of numeric control. I believe that the device that has been revived and hybridized in this way is capable of generating new aesthetic experiences for the audience. I leave you with an example of an installation I created called Celestial Harmonies that embodies what's said before. Thank you for your attention. I'm sorry. To be continued... Thank you. To be continued... Hello, my name is Dr. Lily Husbands. Welcome to my talk entitled Visible Vibrations, Stephen Wallachian's Direct Animations and Jazz. Steven Wallachian's direct animations and jazz. The direct animations that make up Steven Wallachian's Spotlight series are enormously energetic, besieging spectators with electric splashes of neon colors and the whirling and leaping of lines that shake, scramble, and pulse in harmony with their equally lively soundtracks. Like Walter Rudman, Len Lye, Harry Smith, and Norman McLaren before him, Wallachian's direct animations are expressive responses to their musical soundtracks, as if the interior energetic sensations of listening to music are being manifested in the movements of the animated imagery. Engaging with Wallachian's films involves allowing one's senses to be led by the intense polyrhythms of the music and the parallel movements of the imagery. The relationship between soundtrack and imagery in his works is so immediate that listening becomes a mode of seeing just as seeing augments listening. of shifting lines, shapes, patterns, colors, and sounds that comprise Wallachian's abstract animations flood the senses, inviting immersive absorption on the part of the spectator by evoking responses synesthetically distributed amongst the optical, aural, proprioceptive, and tactile powers of perception. In this paper, I aim to examine the kinds of responses that are elicited by the visceral, manual nervousness of directly scratched and painted images on celluloid in Wallachian's Spotlight series, which spans from 1982 to 2006, focusing in particular on their propensity for evoking a feeling of kinesthetic empathy with swing and bebop jazz music. I investigate the idea that Wallachian's works are examples of visual music where the impulsive forces of dance are expressed graphically by means of the direct animation technique. Direct animation possesses certain inherent qualities such as immediacy, accelerated kinesis, and improvisational flow that correspond isomorphically with the extemporized uptempo meters of particular forms of jazz music. Gestalt theorist Rudolf Arnheim describes the concept of isomorphism as quote the structural kinship between the stimulus pattern and the expression it conveys end quote. It refers to the quote similarity of structure in material disparate media, suggesting that such structural kinship is so compelling precisely in that it is directly and spontaneously experienced." That is, the forms of sensory stimuli in these works complement each other in ways that seem to go together in a sensorily satisfying way. Wallachian's direct animations bear the markings of the artist who has prepared and set imagery to music while they simultaneously possess the qualities of materiality and kinesis that are unique to their mechanical nature. The physical traces of Wallachian's actions are brought to life by the kinesis of the animation slash projection itself and the spectators are encouraged to empathize with the shapes and movements that appear on screen. Although the rate at which the artist creates the imagery and the pace at which the spectators encounter them differ enormously, and even though spectators may be aware of the painstaking creative process behind it, the resulting aesthetic object has the look and feel of an abstract form of dance. Animating directly on the filmstrip is an imminently physical process, in many ways more closely linked to drawing and painting than to conventional filmmaking practices. Wollisham uses different set of tools and techniques for each of his direct animations, depending on what he feels the music calls for, but one of his works most striking characteristics is that he often uses the hand-painted original as a negative, meaning that his color palette is inverted in the positive print, thus blue ink appears bright orange, etc. This gives his painted imagery a particularly luminescent, almost neon appearance with bright colors on black backgrounds. Because the work in direct animation is done by hand on or across each individual frame of film, which is sometimes as small as eight millimeters, although he often works in 35, even the most controlled instances of direct animation feature unstable images and imperfect lines, which moreover tremble slightly as the film strip runs through the projector. Thus there is a rushing, quivering immediacy that is intrinsic to this handmade mode of animated filmmaking that gives its imagery an underlying relentless rhythm. This shakiness, combined with the speed with which the images appear, produces a freneticism that can generate energizing physiological effects in spectators, and the tremulous speed of the imagery creates a visual counterpart for the sound vibrations of voices and instruments on the soundtrack. As in drawing and painting, spectators are closely confronted with the traces of the artist's actual gestures, and although the film's rate of projection endows their movements with impossible speed and illusory continuity, the flow of action created on film conveys a sense of the fluidity of creative movement. In any given film, the music's rhythmic timing is an essential part of establishing a correspondence between image movement and music. And Wallachian takes full advantage of the natural rhythmic qualities of working directly on film. He also uses recurrent visual motifs that act as associative graphic matches to particular instruments tonal qualities. The isomorphic relations between the imagery and the instruments timbres and sounds develop out of a synesthetic impulse in Wallachian's process. He has remarked, quote, it is a question of trying to answer how a sound would look like. Like if it's a saxophone, it would look like a splotch or a line. I am just trying to satisfy my curiosity of sound, really. End quote. Not only do Wallachian's works offer visualizations of what a sound looks like in terms of shape, color, and movement, but they also display two-dimensional spatial configurations that place them in relation to other sounds. In this way, Wallachian's isomorphic graphic compositions are expressive of the phenomenological experience of listening to music in terms of levels of attention and impressions of spatial relationships between the musical triad, melody, harmony, rhythm. A listener's attention can be drawn to certain aural elements over others within a musical composition. For instance, melody tends to stand out in what Don Eyde calls a core phenomenon against the background phenomenon of the rhythmic or harmonic arrangements. against the background phenomenon of the rhythmic or harmonic arrangements. As Augusto Mazzoni writes, this intentional field presents different levels of prominence. For instance, a single melody exhibits its linear shape and its psychic characteristics in the foreground, while the secondary elements stay in the background. In the few cases that the music possesses a strong melodic strain, the types of markings that Wallachian uses to portray it are linear forms that glide and pirouette, divide and make circling movements, tracing trajectories across the screen. Although many of Wallachian's direct animations set to jazz music are to some extent isomorphically spatialized, the clearest example is Camer's Take Five, set to the 1959 jazz piece Take Five by the David Brubeck Quartet. Brubeck's Take Five is an example of cool jazz, which exhibits softer, more subdued tempos than the busy polyrhythms of bebop. Its slower tempo offers the potential to see the work as a more precise visualization of the music. Dotted splatter patterns echo the percussive and bass elements of the jazz composition, making full use of the rhythmic shake and tremble of the direct animation technique, while the melodic flow of Paul Desmond's mellifluous alto saxophone is played out in the foreground in virtuosic animated lines that act as dancing figures. I mean. Right, so cameras take five is somewhat of an exception in Wallachian's Of, as most of the jazz pieces that Wallachian uses in his films exhibit complex percussive polyrhythms with improvisational harmonic and melodic strains played at extremely rapid tempos. In these films with faster tempos, Wallachian's imagery often relies more heavily on the rhythmic pulse of the drums and percussive section, as in Diddy.comma from 2001. Watch a bit of this one. Arr. Arr. Arr. Arr. Arr. Arr. Arr. Arr. Arr. Arr. Arr. Arr. Arr. Arr. Thank you. so Give me a sense of that there. For spectators, watching Wallachian's animations can feel like watching a kind of dance that has been abstracted into pure disembodied movement. In fact, Wallachian's predecessors, Lye and McLaren, have described their on-screen animated imagery in terms of a kind of virtual or vicarious form of dance to music. For instance, McLaren has said, quote, every film is, for me, a kind of dance. Because the most important thing in film is movement and motion, no matter what it is you're moving, whether it's people or objects or drawings, when it's done, it's a form of dance. That's my way of thinking about film. End quote. Watching dance, spectators can experience kinesthetic empathy when they feel they are participating to some degree in the movements they observe and the sounds they hear, even while remaining stationary. Although some of Wallachian's animations are filled with, quote, flexible humanizing curves, end quote, to borrow Rudolf Arnheim's phrase. These films' graphic markings are bodiless. They flash, jolt, squiggle, shimmy, and disappear in time to the music. The flittering visuals are more like the ephemeral sounds themselves than any dancing body, yet they still exhibit the basic elements of dance in the ways that Suzanne Langer characterizes it in feeling and form. She contends that the primary illusion of dance is a virtual realm of power, not actual physically exerted power, but appearances of influence and agency created by virtual gesture. In her phenomenological study of dance, Maxine Jeth's Johnstone expands on this idea to explain that the phenomenological basis for maintaining that virtual force is the primary illusion of dance is that movement itself is primarily a revelation of force. In Wallachian's abstract animations, these graphic gestures are virtual revelations of force that spectators are invited to empathize with kinesthetically. Jietz-Johnstone makes another observation that is useful for thinking about Wallachian's animations as a form of dance, when she observes that the linear pattern of the dance may be abstracted from the dance as a whole and drawn graphically on paper in order to represent the directional path of the total moving body. She notes that when we imagine dance as in planning choreography, consciousness apprehends movement as an imaginative visual kinetic form that manifests itself as linear or aerial designs and patterns that represent the movement and spatialization of visual force. The suggestion that bodily movements can be meaningfully distilled into graphic elements is particularly illuminating with regard to how Wallachian's works linear and aerial designs and patterns may be understood as an abstracted form of dance. In these works the musical soundtracks act phenomenologically as a bridge between artist and spectator, in the sense that the song that Wallachian is responding to is the same song that the spectator is hearing. Through the intermediary of animation, spectators are able to witness in musical time the somatic expressiveness that the music called for in the artist. Moreover, spectators' own responses to the music are influenced by the expressive movements of Wallachian's imagery. Because the relationship between music and movement in Wallachian's work is synchronous and isomorphic, the invigorating qualities of the music further invite spectators to empathize with the rapid flow and rhythm of the imagery. Daniel Belgrad observes that rhythm is time experienced through the body, and the rhythm dominant vivace tempos of the jazz songs are particularly infectious and absorbing. Mikel Dufresne also describes the way music acts ourselves in order to grasp it in the object. We put ourselves in harmony with the imperious becoming of this object. Henri Lefebvre similarly observes that to grasp a rhythm, it is necessary to have been grasped by it. One must let oneself go, give oneself over, abandon oneself to its duration. The immersive quality of rhythmic music that Dufresne and Lefebvre are referring to here can be understood in terms of E.H. Gombrich's description of Einfühlung, when he states that, according to this view, we respond to shapes much as we respond to music by dancing inwardly. This notion fuses the phenomenological experience of listening to music by dancing inwardly. This notion fuses the phenomenological experience of listening to music with the responsive movements of dance as they are felt inside the body. It is this sense of inner movement or inner inward dance that is being expressed by Wallachian's imagery. Belgrade also observed that the polyrhythmic complexity and irregular phrasings that characterize bebop jazz are signals that the music is meant for complexity and irregular phrasings that characterize bebop jazz are signals that the music is meant for listening, not for dancing. Listeners trying to track the thread of the solos in Coco had to pitch their attention at a high level of nervous excitement. In the majority of Wallachian's direct films featuring jazz, his images rhythmically and graphically respond to, in the case of bebop, undanceable musical forms with the precision and timing and freedom of movement that no physical dancer could achieve. Lai makes a complimentary observation in his essay The Art That Moves when he writes that kinetic art has freed us from the restricted and anatomical range of dance movements. Animated lines and shapes are weightless and mercurial enough to match the movements of vibrating air. Moreover, that bebop is considered undanceable does not mean that listeners do not continue to feel the music in their bodies and experience natural urges to move to that music, nervous excitement quite often tends to manifest itself through jerky, twitchy movements in the parts of the body that can move most quickly, such as the extremities. Jeff Dyer describes this sensation of listening to jazz music, stating, quote, the movement of jazz was centrifugal. It started at the extremities, at the fingers and toes, and worked its way inward, working its way to the heart, end quote. In fact, the name bebop is rumored to have originated out of the onomatopoeic sounds that the bebop musicians like Dizzy Gillespie would hum in a manner similar to the way a scat singing uses nonsense syllables, vocables, to mimic the instruments of the jazz ensemble. Even while watching Wallachian's films from a stationary, seated position, the infectious energy of both music and image working together can manifest in spectators' bodies in the tapping of toes, the drumming of fingers, the shimmying of shoulders, or even scat singing under the breath. These responses can be understood as somatic expressions of the inward dancing to music that the concept of vine-filling describes, and in the case of Wallachian's works, kinesthetic empathy with a particularly vibrant form of visual music. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. And it would be almost like a catatonic thing where I'd kind of just repetitively do like automatic writing, just kind of, you know, evolving stuff. And I'd get loops and sort of piles of stuff. And then I'd sort of organize those into kind of rhythms and things like that and would start to sort of loop them and play them. I mean, I took a bit of a direction out of Robert Breer who kind of told me that, you know, he'd put some of his animation together and then he'd... It would be almost like a catatonic thing where I'd kind of just repetitively do like automatic writing, just kind of... What's do like automatic writing just kind of what's in there okay I've got a turn loops and sort of piles of stuff and then I'd sort of organize those into I had the other thing going in the background yeah so Robert Breer kind of had this thing about where he kind of shows look at things and then he'd see other visual artifacts inside them and then he'd add them to the work so I kind of started doing that too where i'd start to see shadows or after images or flicker and i'd kind of start to emphasize those more so it became this kind of engagement with this moving image working on a steam beck etc and scratching it and then i would make you know i had to also make short films with my collaborator michael Luck, who kind of appeared, some of his sound was in what we heard in the second iteration. And there was a dialogue there and I'd sort of start to add those rhythms in and there was a kind of visual sound kind of dialogue sort of happening. And that sort of then played in the performances too. And I was kind of interested in those kind of rhythms that sort of seemed to pull emotions out of my body, you know, a bit like when you're in a trance or you're dancing and this kind of trance thing happens to your body and things in motion sort of come out. And I was kind of looking for those kind of rhythms in the work. It was also always a very physical thing. It was very important to me that I had some material there to put my hands on. Which also related back I think to my parents, like I mentioned, being a bricklayer and a seamstress, it was all about working with your hands. Maybe we could come back to the hands a little bit later on as well. Thinking about that first iteration, it kind of struck me that it felt like there was a lot of subliminal, maybe subliminal messages aren't quite the right thing, but just enough time to engage some part of your consciousness that uh notices and then it's then it's gone you know was that was that something which was conscious or unconscious you know was it was it subliminal that you sort of went subliminal i suppose is one way to to look i think it became conscious you know i think it was on the verge of narrative or the verge of me and playing with that and getting to that and i think you know there's a kind of group of work people in mel melbourne and kind of sending around the can't put out the campus film notes and we meet every second sunday at their place and watch stuff and talk about it but there was kind of this mixture of formalism probably influenced by the lond London filmmakers co-op, but also mixed with a sense of autobiography that sort of was working in that group, which was a bit different to, you know, it was I think what was happening in America and the United States. I'm only really starting to kind of analyse and kind of work out what that difference is, but it has to do with the autobiographical level that it is about something that's happening to you. autobiographical level that it is about something that's happening to you and through this kind of this language this visual kind of language you know which you know we'd see a lot of work for international work that's kind of informed that uh yeah yeah so you you it's always find it nice to hear about these, especially informal meetups that happen all the way around the world. Every art form has their last Sunday of the month or every other week kind of places. But do you feel that there's an Australian or Antipodean approach to your work? Is there something that, and you mentioned as an immigrant as well, that arriving in Australia had a particular effect on you. But is there an Australian way of looking at this? Yeah, I mean, it hasn't been written or documented properly. You know, Louise Curram and Sally Golding and myself have kind of been talking about that lately and kind of trying to sort of do a presentation about working out what Australian expanded cinema animation, what is essentially different. And a lot of it is to do with the fact that we were kind of derivative, we were separated, you know, and that whole idea about migration that I mentioned in my talk was kind of important too, because it seemed to me that a lot of people who were kind of working in this area came from migrant backgrounds, you know, in Melbourne, that is, which is very much as a strong sort of migrant multicultural thing there. And it's about an outside language. I think it was also a community of people who weren't part of the mainstream. And so they had to kind of find ways with talking from outside of culture. And that sort of came into it as well. But there is something I think essentially about sort of Melbourne. I mean, there's a strong punk thing came out of Melbourne too, you know, and some of the people that, you know, we work with, we're involved in that as well. So, yeah, but it hasn't been kind of documented yet. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's a, there. Well, there's a project, right? Well, I've been working on it. I've been kind of, some of my colleagues have kind of written articles about them and tried to sort of work that out. And through doing those sort of things, you become aware, especially when you do sort of see things that happen in other countries, like in Serbia, for example, too, that there are these histories that are kind of hidden or marginalised from the, you know, from a, sometimes think about it as, you know, being on the margins of the margin, you know? Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, I think, you know, this is such an interesting thing where things get discovered and rediscovered at different periods and and there's a you know sort of geographical zeitgeists that that happen at different times but maybe we could sort of change the tone a little bit and i'm going to try to sort of roll some questions into one a little bit because the top the topic that you um are looking at you know trauma is definitely not an easy an easy topic to uh you know discuss people who have had traumatic events you know and experiences in their own life um you know they or may not have a you know different types of relation to talking about it and thinking about it yeah often invisible it's invisible thing. So I'm struck by the kind of externalization and projection of the medium and whether you think that there is something that allows an expression of trauma without it necessarily being explicit in its description that you think exists? Maybe just expand. Well, yeah, I think that argument and that way of thinking about it, Harry, sort of started really in terms of this tension between analogue and digital work, you know, and in a way, you know, just on a technical level, the idea of a kind of digital work where it's all inside the computer i was very much interested in bringing it out and making it visible in terms of the mechanics of those things by being there the things that happen and that seemed to be almost metaphorical for the whole idea about how trauma works on the body that it gets embedded in the body and it needs to be kind of come out and made visible so the tension sort of allow those kind of things to happen a bit uh and you know trauma i don't necessarily think it has to be necessarily bad abuse i mean like i tried to say you know when a new technology comes along there's a lot of not understandings of how that works and you have to kind of work through it to try and make sense of it you know and how to read it you know how to kind of make sense of those things so you know i find that kind of interesting and yeah and and you mentioned you mentioned the audience you know you you're quite aware of your audience i noticed in your presentation you said you know the the audience will will notice the hand here the audience will notice that. Do you think you're trying to create some kind of shared experience of what it, of the process? I can see Birgitta here is talking about Lily Husband's point about kinesthetic empathy, you know, there's a, you know, there's a researcher, you know, sort of the mirror neuron system and all this kind of thing where through hearing and seeing the world, we also understand what it would be like to physically feel it. I wonder if there's maybe something. Well, that really fits to me in this whole idea of that situational accessible memory about parts of your normal body that only you only remember things when you get prompts it doesn't automatically come to you as a narrative so it's about engaging those parts of the body uh and i think it's probably the same as you know any musicians would probably be used to the fact that informing in front of an audience that something happens you know i also I also found that idea of Maya Derren's about how, you know, in voodoo, kind of the body is possessed. There's something in the body. You know, in voodoo, it's the possessed of a kind of history of that sense of place. But I think for contemporary performers, it's more something else. But there's a certain that the body performs these things you know and the the point that Brigitte made about Merleau-Ponty about sort of the cluster of you know senses and how they come together in a cluster and how they're kind of formed there I think that's sort of really part of that and that we're all those kind of walking six or seven senses and they get combined in different ways with different technologies. And I think in the analog performative kind of thing and the immersive of having things all around you and with peripheral vision, it kind of engages more than just viewing a screen, you know, and it sort of immerses you in your envelopes like you're swimming in an ocean of some if you know to use a metaphor i think i probably i probably moved away from your question well that's all right but but you also you brought up something you know which which actually um you know this this connects to uh some of bagheera's research actually about the reanimation, thinking about it as a sort of the spiritualists, you know, the word animate to animate, you know, has a direct kind of relationship to those. And also then the zombie technology in Alberto's talk. We come across it in these different ways. Maybe that zombie thing relates a bit to the whole voodoo thing as well, you know, in terms of what's possessed in there. Another thing that I was struck with that ran across all three epochs of your work is the strong rhythmic element that has come from the sound. What came first in the process? I mean, I know process questions are always a little bit tricky in some sense but do you are you led by the sound or is is the rhythm of the visuals does that necessitate a rhythmic oh it's a bit of both i suppose but if you get it back far enough you know before i got into imagery i was really into the music scene and listening to music and being part of that i really got into kind of visually try and kind of make visual manifestations of the things that really caught me you know in performances that I saw so but you know like I think I said a bit before I'd get into this kind of automatic writing stage where I'd do a bit of scratching and sort of home processing and building imagery and experimenting with that that would then sort of accumulate and eventually reorganise into rhythms and music. And, you know, even though those performances were based on a series of, you know, direct films that would be five or six minutes long, that it would be evolved over 10 years, a whole series of them. And they were then reconstituted in terms of these kind of performative elements where I'd have, you know, different ones, multiple copies or different ones running on different projectors in different orders, which I then insert my shadow play within all that. So it was kind of, they were all kind of tools and it kind of evolved, you know, and it was also the possibilities, you know, I mean, there was a period there where the whole experimental performance stuff was kind of very hard to do until the kind of sonic community kind of reinvigorated the kind of whole idea about working with visuals, you know, in the early 2000s in Australia. And then work like mine sort of started to get a currency within that kind of environment, you know know from a more visual kind of view as a as a composer first and foremost and I think that that there's a history of wanting to etch the sound you know wanting to think about what it goes it goes very deep you know this feeling of wanting to visualise what we hear because it somehow turns it into a different type of well it turns it into an artefact it can turn it into something physical I can see that Alberto has managed to join us we can sort of talk to him a bit more some of these some of these questions i was hoping to segue across one of them actually was this uh or maybe this is a good way to to do it which which is your um strict definition alberto i don't know can you just acknowledge if you can hear us okay in the chat very quickly. Yes. It's a strict definition of multimodal synesthesia, this rather than it as a metaphor. How much did that guide your process trying to keep a strict sort of boundary on the connection between sound and an image? Well it's a, I hope first of all the connection works. I am in a strange location, I'm on tour so I hope that the internet works. So yeah it's very restrictive choice that i made to to work with uh both simultaneously my signals at certain point they split and they go to the speakers and to whatever visualization device i have so a laser or a crt or something like that and that forces me to work in a completely different way but i noticed that also has an effect on the audience. Every time people come to me and say, we see this very synchronous material. And so I start thinking that there is something that truly is different when you don't translate, when you don't make an arbitrary choice when it's exactly the same signal and I think you develop some sort of extra sense or intermodal understanding of the word that we have normally I mean nature works like that when you have an object falling it creates a sound that is connected with a fall and and but when we do digital art we tend to decouple the the the experiences or we just oppose experiences which is perfect perfectly fine but it's also interesting when we have exactly the same material and the speed of electricity doesn't delay even a tiny bit and I think this is uh creates something different in the perception of the the audience so I'm really interested about this perceptual uh phenomena that inter-correlate between the senses and somehow generate an extra sense or an extra understanding that is difficult to describe but it seems pretty real when you experience it. So I'm going to just sort of interrogate this question of non-interpretive translation because your sort of definition of it there was that it was coming from a single source but there's still some sort of decisions that have to be made even in you know most basic terms what color you're going to project you know or what type of color a laser is available you know there are constraints that are both uh you know decisions that you make and ones that are just arbitrary constraints put upon you for some for some reason um so you know is it possible to how or maybe a better question how how much is it desirable to remove interpretation and what is lost and what is gained in that type of process it's a difficult question I know but I think it's a an interesting thing that people both creating art sort of algorithmically and also in a very handmade way come across in two different two different ways so interest really interested to know your thoughts on that kind of area. Yeah, it's a very interesting question. Thank you for asking it. In general, I find it always liberating to have a lot of constraints in a way. It's kind of oxymoron, but I like the fact of having few tools in the case of laser for example you have basically one dot you're drawing everything with one dot that really limits your possibilities but also for the audience it's easy to understand that you are basically having just a line and you're drawing everything with one line so it's like sketching with a pen and instead of having all these multiple possibilities given by digital projections but of course yeah there is always arbitrary choices the for as you said the colors is always chosen uh the shape i have x and y the the signal that I used to create the shapes goes to left and right in the speaker so this is like hardwired but the colors is always an arbitrary choice so sometimes I decide to put some blue or red or green or whatever combination it's's difficult to really give an answer. Of course, art is subjective and taps into our inner interpretation, feelings, interpretation of the world, of the moment, of the situation, the room we're in. And I think the public also interprets like that. I think the public also interprets like that. But I always, I think the answer for me lies in between. So I have a lot of constraints so I can be also fast. A lot of constraints means that you have also few parameters in a way. So you decide to draw with one hand, for example, or you decide to use only a certain color to do everything or black and white for example and I think that gives uh it boosts the creativity because you have to be extra creative with little material that you have to also limit your choices and uh but the rest is also subjective so I find it beautiful that art can lead to every time something changes and everything depends on the moment and on the flow of the instant I just said something to that uh yeah thanks uh I mean to, there's also this dialogue, you know, that you're talking about in terms of the dialogue between you and the technology and the push and pull of all that, that each technology sort of has a different impact on different senses and you have to kind of negotiate and work out what that is. And that's kind of an adventure in its own, you know, in sorting that out. And sometimes they are invisible things that aren't that evident in the kind of more conservative uses of these technologies, you know, and it's nice to be able to push those boundaries and mischievously point those things out. Yes, I think every tool that we use, not only for art, but even even in general has a design in it and this is what media archaeology tries to explore you open the tool and you try to understand why was it conceived like this and somehow it also shapes your creativity with it so this is important to realize if you have a hammer it's difficult to use it to put a screw in the wall and the other way around and um so so but of course you can misuse technology and that's also very interesting you can try to do things that with a tool that was not supposed to be um but i always try to, yeah, it's important to realise that every tool has only a certain possibility written inside and a kind of a logic or a philosophy that is in it, inbuilt. It's always good to try and challenge some of those things. Yes. I've got a question, Alberto, about the tool of archaeology, a more broad sort of conceptual tool, I suppose. Normally when you think about archaeology, the thing that springs to mind would be static artefacts rather than media and ones from a much longer period in time in the past. What can you teach those archaeologists, you know, trowels and sand type archaeologists, and what can they teach you? Is there a dialogue between these things, which seems so very, very different? What are the lessons that you can learn from each other? Well, I think there is always the speed of evolution of media increases rapidly in the last years. We jump from electricity to electronic. to the point that machines are creating our media now instead of us because our hands cannot reach the micro level necessary for it. And we are losing also materiality at the same time. This is the direction we're going to. We cannot really fix a mobile phone we would need ants or microbes to physically detach or resolder some connections and so we are too too big but I think the process is kind of similar so they I think this proper archaeologists, historian archaeologists, they explored these objects that they find from an ancient civilization, trying to understand what they are for. You find a specific vase or a container and you try to understand what was the use of this and what purpose, depending on the ergonomics, depending on what was it for? And I think, despite this seems quite absurd, but the technology from the 80s or from the 70s or from the 60s, maybe the modern generation, they don't really know what they were for. And even us, like, why did we conceive VHS cassettes in that way? Why this big? Why they could be erased and rewritten? You know, why can't we open a VHS and repair it, but we cannot open an iPod and repair it, you know. So there is some logic and by looking at the archaeologists we can use the same approach to understand what was just 40 years ago that we still maybe don't understand why it was conceived like that. Well I mean you know in the 70s why it was conceived like that. Well, I mean, you know... Maybe the people in the 70s conceived it as an older, ancient civilization. Well, you know, I mean, 40 years ago, I was kind of working then, and I think my hands were much more important in my work. And one of the reasons is probably the way you're talking about this is the fact that the hands have become redundant in some of these technologies. And I kind of want to reassert the importance of those hands as a sort of political act against those kind of shifts and i kind of you know in terms of what you're talking about there i've see the trajectory of my practice you know coming from 40 to now as sort of being transformed by all these technologies but there's certain things that I try to keep to do with my body and the way my body acts and this idea of intimacy that's become so important now in terms of the fact that we're being sort of colonised so much by these technologies inside the body rather than just outside. And I see that as a kind of shift that you're intimating in what you're pointing out. But I think that's a really important political question, you know, about what that archaeology tells us about these shifts. Yes, and I see that you interpose your body between the projection and the screen and you distort the light and you alter the projection and I find this a nice way of trying to be inside the technology and somehow interfere physically with the technology so to put your body again in the circuit which is what I find it also fascinating these people that in the 80s or 70s they were playing music instruments opening them and licking their hands and short circuits part of the circuits to create to to melt the body with the electricity and the circuit without dying yeah oh sometimes they die too which but i think that's really interesting looking at those histories like that, I think, and making kind of seeing how our bodies have to relate now on the basis of those things. And what concerns me sometimes is how some of those interactions or those dialogues with these technologies sort of get lost or become invisible again or get forgotten. You know, very interested in making sure that they don't. I don't think I'll be successful at that. But I mean, that's kind of part of my project. They'll get they'll be, you know, lost and rediscovered, you know, as happens with all sorts of technologies over over time you know uh i would just like to sort of finish we've only got a few more minutes to wrap up it's amazing how quickly it goes when you start talking about all this wide variety of topics and only being able to skim the surface but i'd like to ask a question for you both which is to do with the audience reaction of two pieces in in particular dirk the one uh where you talked about the feeling of uh getting a bit you know motion sick and and uh disorientating uh look of the 360 degree dome projection you know what what reaction did people get from that because it you know looked like it would be a strong one and then and then alberto afterwards if you could talk about the reaction of your neighbours if people gave you feedback on that projection, because, you know, you reminded me that that was a global moment, but then you were projecting it into your neighbourhood in a very sort of local way. So just a short sort of summary of some of those feedback from those audiences. That idea about motion sickness really came up more in terms of the whole digital thing and it's kind of related to peripheral vision and it's the fact that the image is so unified and sort of moves around. I think audience reaction is they want to hold on. They need to hold onto something because they feel that they're losing control over their body because they lose their balance. You know, I think that's kind of something that's happened a lot in terms of, you know, like joy rides and things like that. It's kind of an issue that's going on digitally. So I think it's an interesting artifact and maybe that's just a trauma that needs to be negotiated over time by the audience. Historically, just like with train travel that I mentioned, you know, where in train travel people would get sick because the train was going too fast and they couldn't look out of the window properly and they had to learn to be able to sample what was going past. And I think everybody's, you know, I think people are still a bit naive about some of those things and they have to work out new ways of looking and new ways of reacting with these environments, you know, that have, yeah, because, yeah, that's about the best I could say about that, I think. Yeah. I'll leave it at that. Yeah, that's a good way to bring it back to the fast change of technology. And Alberto, what about you? What was your, did you get any feedback from your neighbors I guess most people had no idea who was producing these some people probably thought at the beginning that it was completely crazy and maybe I am I well I took the advantage that laser doesn't need a projection screen and I don't need really a big sound system so I just started doing something because I was fed up and I love to entertain myself and then all the people came on to the balconies I was living in this eight stories building so a lot of people were on the balconies families there was dinner time and everybody was enthusiastic I got an applause at the end it wasn't even that great of a performance but it was just a good uh good moment to do it so to entertain the people with something different yeah I think it's a really I think it's something that will stick in people's minds more than you would would imagine um thank you very much both that was really interesting to to talk to you um Apologies that we don't have Lily to also talk about her presentation is of course online now and there's contact details. So if you have a question for Lily or want to contact her about her research into direct animation, then of course you're more than welcome to do so. But in the meantime, I'd just like to thank you on behalf of Jürgen and Birgitta and the rest of the expanded animation team. And enjoy the rest of your late evening, Dirk, because I know it's already late into the night where you are, and the rest of the conference as you're able to manage before you collapse in a heap. But it's been wonderful to talk to you both and thank you so much for your interesting and candid responses. No worries. Cheers. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.