A Virtual Tour: Teaching Claude Debussy's Nuages in an online presentation that shows both a deep analysis of the music and the cross-domain mapping into a 104 by 4 feet visualization

Description

"Intermedia," a term described by the Fluxus artist and theorist, Dick Higgins, is the inclusion of two or more different media in one medium. When the German mid-century artist, Kurt Schwitters, created his Ursonate, he wrote a sound-poem in a four-movement sonata form imported from the music domain. All visualizations of music are hybrids, and we can describe them as the fusion of at least two modes into one. In my session, I will demonstrate a "virtual tour" (in development) of one section of a project called Legacy of Artist-Scientists: An online museum with virtual tours. During the 1980s, I, Jack Ox, created a 104 by 4 feet painting that visualized the complete Nuages by Claude Debussy. I also made eleven drawing/scores with hand-copied music and score elements for the visualization. My presentation will show the process I engaged in while creating a visualization. The end product emerged from mapping all of the analyzed aspects of the music into a sophisticated visual language. This process of creating a nonlinear dynamic complex system is described by conceptual metaphor and blending theories. Please go to https://intermediaprojects.org/pages/Debussy7.html for a view of the materials to be presented in this virtual tour.

Takeaway

The world has now found how important and necessary it is to educate people without personal contact. Teachers from elementary school through university classes have to learn new technologies and teaching methods in record time. We have seen mixed reports about success levels in these endeavors; the challenges are profound. However, the development of MOOCs, such as the courses put up by the Santa Fe Institute on complexity science, show us how well they can work. If you are a learner who can learn alone and profit from revisiting lectures on video, it is a new world. You can learn to program in python or do calculus! We must keep thinking about how to make complex information accessible and understandable online. This virtual tour project began when I taught two Ph.D. seminars in musicology for Prof. Sabine Feisst at ASU in 2018. I had just finished putting up thirty years of musical visualizations on https://intermediaprojects.org, the website for the 501 (c) (3), Intermedia Projects Inc. Therefore, I taught the seminars from the website, explaining the score/drawings in detail and showing the mapping processes between music and visualizations. The students were pleased with the sessions and wanted to access the site with the information I had shared with them in person. The idea of virtual tours by the artists, if still living, began at this moment. The virtual tours will benefit researchers in the present and the future, having the artists' own words on what they were doing, and what they were thinking. Educators should be able to import this Debussy presentation and other 'pods' into their curriculum. Depending on the level of the students, instructors may present this material in different ways. I hope that in discussions during the presentation and after, we can all engage in new and different ways to teach complex information systems online.

Abstract

Intermedia Projects' Legacy of Artist-Scientists is an online museum (under construction) showcasing 40 years of each Artist-Scientist. Each legacy section includes artist biographies and an exhibition timeline, a 360-degree view of their art and video presentations showing their work, exhibits, and art-science collaborations. Legacy of Artist-Scientists secures an artist's legacy and provides low-cost educational units. Our project will document a full body of work from artists in the art-science field, who have followed a conceptual thread leading to new thoughts and work products over a lifetime. This project fits many goals espoused by Leonardo, the journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology: "1. To advocate, document, and make known the work of artists, researchers, and scholars developing new ways in which contemporary arts interact with science, technology, and society. 2. To create a forum and meeting places where artists, scientists, and engineers can meet, exchange ideas, and where appropriate, collaborate. 3. To contribute, through the interaction of the art and sciences to the creation of the new culture that will be needed to transition to a sustainable planetary society," Roger Malina, Ph.D., Physics, Arts & Science Lab, ATEC, UT Dallas, Executive Editor, Leonardo Journal. Artist-scientists are more likely to have a Ph.D.; they are more concerned with the process in their work than final products. Artist-scientists often work in teams because the work they produce depends on many knowledge layers and skills. They are process-oriented and therefore include computer programmers among their tribe. Their form of art is truly unique and integrates well with digital technology and the Internet. Legacy of Artist-Scientists online museum will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Each artist will create a virtual tour of their online materials, biography, exhibition timeline, and in-depth explanations of their goals. Intermedia Projects is a New Mexico-based 501(c)3. Our mission is to support research that will contribute to this intersecting structure of art, science, and design. Since its establishment, the organization has encouraged and enabled projects at the nexus of art, science, and design, through shows and performances; presentation of scholarly work at conferences and in publications. In this presentation, Jack Ox will take the audience through one of the virtual tours in her online museum exhibition. This one is Debussy's Nuages, but the end product will show visualizations from Stravinsky, Bruckner, John Cage, and Alvin Curran. Other artists scheduled are Rich Gold, the co-founder of Xerox PARC's Artist in Residence program, and New Zealand artists, Raewyn Turner and Brian Harris, who create experimental, sensory works that combine art, science, and technology using electronics, sensors, and microprocessors. As a member of the HUB, Scot Gresham-Lancaster is an early pioneer of networked computer music and has developed many "cellphone operas," and Peter Beyls, the Belgian artist and composer who explores computer programing to solve artistic questions. Beyls creates Generative Art, where he invents abstract systems manifested in machine drawings and interactive audiovisual installations.