AMEN: JOHN WHITNEY (VISUAL INTERPRETATION OF MUSIC)

The "Big Crit" with my fellow students provided much for for thought. One of the areas that really came up was creating a more obvious and creative visual interpretation of the Amen Drum Break for the audience. This was to help the audience realise that the drum break on all of the music played was actually the same just appropriated and re-interpreted and contextualised. Secondary to this was to create a more visual aesthetic for the audience.

From my earlier research into the work of Oskar Fischinger other names cropped up also doing interesting things with creating visuals to represent music. The aim again is to create a contextual background to deepen my knowledge of practitioners, styles ands techniques. The aim is that I may be able to use directly or as draw upon as inspiration or the catalyst for my own visual interpretations of music for my Amen Brother piece.

John Whitney (1917–1995) was an American animator, composer and inventor, widely considered to be one of the fathers of computer animation. His early works often in tandem with his brother John created their remarkable series of Film Exercises between 1943 and 1944. These films are visually based on modernist composition theory, the carefully varied permutations of form are manipulated with cut-out masks so that the image photographed is pure direct light shaped, rather than the light reflected from drawings as in traditional animation. the brothers wanted to move away from the symphonic music of Oskar Fischinger which they felt was somewhat old fashioned. Therefore the eerie, sensuous neon glow of these forms is paralleled by pioneer electronic music sound scores composed by the brothers using a pendulum device to write sounds directly on the film's soundtrack area, with precisely controlled calibrations. At that time, before the perfection of recording tape, these sounds - with exotic "pure" tone qualities, mathematically even chromatic glissandos and reverberating pulsations - were truly revolutionary and shocking. The brothers won a Grand Prize at the 1949 Brussels Experimental Film Competition for the Film Exercises.

The simplistic nature of the Five Film Exercises I like but the thing I have taken most from the piece is the use of colour. I researched and looked into colour psychology on my professional Practice module for the course and it may be worth revisiting this. also in a throwback to my research into the colour and shapes of Oskar Fischingers work it may be worth investigating the theory and psychology of shapes.


Below is John Whitney's demo reel of work created with his analog computer/film camera magic machine he built from a WWII anti-aircraft gun sight. Also Whitney and the techniques he developed with this machine were what inspired Douglas Trumbull (special fx wizard) to use the slit scan technique on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Yantra above by James Whitney (1957) is bizarre, abstract, yet beguiling and the link between the music and the visual interpretation of it works well. A commentator on Youtube sums it up well "This is the in-between area, where thoughts are not fully formed, yet are beginning, shapes are not fully developed, yet are growing, and life is not fully developed, yet is gestating....this is that visual "twilight zone" between being and becoming." I feel that this style may be a little too abstract for my own Amen Break piece but are certainly great brain food.The particle type nature I like but feel it may be not clear enough for my piece and the solid drum hits I need to reflect but it is worth investigating further. 

During the 1950s Whitney used his mechanical animation techniques to create sequences for television programs and commercials. One of his most famous works from this period was the animated title sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, which he collaborated on with the graphic designer Saul Bass. In 1960, he founded Motion Graphics Incorporated, which used a mechanical analogue computer of his own invention to create motion picture and television title sequences and commercials. The following year, he assembled a record of the visual effects he had perfected using his device, titled simply Catalog represented below. In 1966, IBM awarded John Whitney, Sr. its first artist-in-residence position.  themes.




By the 1970s, Whitney had abandoned his analogue computer in favour of faster, digital processes. He taught the first computer graphics class at UCLA in 1972. The pinnacle of his digital films is his 1975 work Arabesque, characterized by psychedelic, blooming colour-forms. In 1969-70 he experimented with motion graphics computer programming at California Institute of Technology. His work during the 1980s and 1990s, benefited from faster computers and his invention of an audio-visual composition program called the Whitney-Reed RDTD (Radius-Differential Theta Differential). Works from this period such as Moondrum (1989–1995) used self-composed music and often explored mystical or Native-American



Both of the works above Catalog (1961) and Matrix III (1972) also give me plenty of inspiration moving forward. I reiterate again how the use of colour and shape are really exciting and the psychology behind these is certainly worth investigating. I also like the naiveness of the images and their simplicity and clarity. Obviously this is due to the technology available to Whitney at the time but it serves his subjects well and feel it would do the same in my work and overcomplicating the visuals is not needed here also. The use of technology I am also a little wary of as the sound of drums is perhaps the most primal of all musical sounds and using a very tech heavy visual production I am not too sure will sit all that well with the piece. However as I am writing this some of the music I will be using is of a more technological nature sampling, electronica, drum and bass etc so perhaps it could be one of a variety of visual representations and not just one. These would need to all have a similar form so as to do the job of visually interpreting the music to the audience continually though so be similar. However  through clever use of colour, size and shape the old genre adage of "repetition but difference" may be applicable here.