FRACTAL ART: September 2013

Monday 30 September 2013

On the Road Visualised

Rhythm Textures

Visually representing Kerouac's sentences by using their punctuation to create circular diagrams. Each word is represented by a line, and the thickness of the lines radiating outwards from the center point provides a record of the pauses.

Literary organism

The structure of On the Road visualised using a simple tree structure. Chapters divide into paragraphs, paragraphs divide into sentences, and sentences divide into words, colour coded according to key themes.

Sentence Drawings

All of the sentences are represented here by the lines, but have been organised according to the number of words par sentence. The sentences are colour-coded according to themes.

Sentence Length

Stefanie Posavec

Writing Without Words

Jack Kerouac: On the Road

Scroll the Road

Jack Kerouac's hand-drawn cross-country road trip map from 'On the Road'

"Jack Kerouac wrote On The Road in one feverish burst, letting it pour onto pages taped together into one enormously long strip of paper – a format he thought lent itself particularly well to his project, since it allowed him to maintain his rapid pace without pausing to reload the typewriter at the end of each page. When he was done, he marched into his editor Robert Giroux's office and proudly spun out the scroll across the floor. The result, however, was equal parts comical and tragic:

"To [Kerouac's] dismay, Giroux focused on the unusual packaging. He asked, "But Jack, how can you make corrections on a manuscript like that?...Jack, you know you have to cut this up. It has to be edited." Kerouac left the office in a rage. It took several years for Kerouac's agent, Sterling Lord, to finally find a home for the book, at the Viking Press.""

Celia Blue Johnson

Maria Popova

Friday 27 September 2013

Architectural Expressionism

TWA Terminal Building

JFK Airport New York

Eero Saarinen

"Its bird-like symbolism, exciting forms and cavernous interior were not simply a casual reminder of the changes that had taken place in architectural thinking in the 1950s, but a demonstration of the architect's role as an originator."

Dennis Sharp

"All the curves, all the spaces and elements right down to the shape of the signs, display boards, railings and check-in desks were to be of a matching nature. We wanted passengers passing through the building to experience a fully-designed environment, in which each part arises from another and everything belongs to the same formal world."

Eero Saarinen

architectural expressionism

Wednesday 25 September 2013

Modernist Soufflé

Photo: Luke Hayes

Photo: Nigel Howard

The Serpentine' s new Gallery Space

architect:

Zaha Hadid

Transformation of a classic gunpowder-store building with a glass fibre canopy extension

Kensington Park, London

details

Tuesday 24 September 2013

Acoustic Soundings

Haroon Mizra

Frame for a Painting

(Piet Mondrian)

details

MOMA

Microtonal Soundings

Microtonal Wall

Tristan Perich

The sounding wall is made up of 1500 simple one-bit speakers, tuned individually to create an intricately varied continuum. From far away it is a white noise, from up close you can hear each individual tone.

MOMA

Monday 23 September 2013

Stockhausen's Journey to Heaven

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Michaels Reise um die Erde

instrumental opera

Lincoln Center

New York

Production of Wiener Taschenoper

musicFabric

"Sometimes music vibrates beyond the clouds, and we can no longer hear its echo... very rarely is truly infinite; then it makes us forget the earth."

This cosmic story of Michael the angel, the sovereign of our universe, who leads humanity to God through love against Lucifer, the cosmic spirit of rebellion and destruction, is a mix of absurdity and spirituality performed by clarinets, trombones, violins and percussions instead of human voice. Michael is a trumpet player who flies on a crane that allows him to challenge gravity, making seven stop journey around the world represented by an orchestra consisting of 28 musicians. The journey is characterised by the sonic 'atmo-spheres', typical instruments, typical musical styles of the places visited.
The three main figures appear as musical forms, called 'formula' by Stockhausen, which allows the figure to be recognized aurally. Layered on top of one another, these three formulas comprise a composition, the 'super-formula', where the three different characteristic formulas confront each other, comprise vibrations that can be transformed into each other through transposition, stretching or compression; so one thing flows into the other, because it all has the same origin. That is the core of 'serial thinking'.

"This opera is also a promise of a more harmonious era following the suffering on this Earth, this human existence."

after-performance

Avery Hall

detail

Sunday 22 September 2013

Dangerous Dots / Beth Dary

Beth Dary

LES

La Monte Young - Fluxus Wawes

Jung Hee Choi: Ahata Anahata, Manifest Unmanifest VII

video detail

0:43

Live Sound and Light Performance

La Monte Young, voice
Marian Zazeela, voice
Jung Hee Choi, voice
sine wave frequencies

Rice
video

multi-channel video installation

Light Point

drawing with pinholes

black wrap, translucent paper, fresnel lights, video

In the transcendent setting of videos, multi-layered, video-lighted drawings and mobile paper-compositions with heavy incense smell, the three vocalists improvise over the implied tonic that changes imperceptibly throughout the performance of the composition, in which the linear superposition of 77 sine wave frequencies and 6 channels of voices are set in ratios based on the harmonics 2, 3 and 7, imperceptibly ascending toward fixed frequencies and then descending toward the starting frequencies, infinitely revolving as in circles, in parallel and various rates of similar motion to create continuous slow phase shift with long beat cycles.

The relationship of the vocalists' improvisation to the drone continuously elaborates the musical meaning of the pitch, creating a compelling, harmonious construct that draws the listener into a profoundly contemplative world.

"eternity taking a form of ephemeral presence that is infinitely variable"

MELA Foundation

New York

Saturday 21 September 2013

Voids of Matisse

Henry Matisse

MET

"The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive, the place occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything has its share."