Eno, Fischinger & Whitney - Visual Music

Eno

Interview with Brian Eno (pt 1)


Interview with Brian Eno (pt 2)

- According to Eno, religion says, "You're not in control," whereas the rest of your life is all about "taking control." "Freedom is the ability to take control." We should be prepared to say, "I'm not in control, and I like it."
- Where is the control in this piece? Does the artist, (Brian Eno) have control? Does the piece itself and the code which makes it run have control? Does the viewer have control?

- "If you wanted to be sure of seeing a repeat(ed image), you'd have to watch for about 450 years."
- According to Eno, we could sit in front of his piece, watch for 450 years and never see the same image twice. If this is true, have we "seen" the piece? Have we "understood" it? Or are we perhaps just seeing a part of a whole? (sort of like looking at a 3 inch square of a massive mural)
- Furthermore, is this a work of art (period)? Or is it a theoretical example? (such as "Every Icon")

- Time is extremely important in this piece. And since the images on the screen are apparently displayed at random, could one say that time itself is more important than the images? If this is true, do the images even matter?

- Without accompanying music, is this piece truly "visual music," as Eno suggests?

Fischinger

Study #7


- Is this piece about music, movement, or the interaction between them? We can see by his work with the Lumigraph that he was interested in the interaction between music and light, so perhaps this interaction is more important than the music or the imagery.

- However, we see from other work that he eschewed music and even sound all together. "Radio Dynamics," has no sound at all, but through its "slow pulsating rhythms and astonishing single-frame flickers of painterly images," seems to reference music. Even its name references sonic content. So perhaps the interaction is STILL important?

Whitney

Arabesque


- Whitney's allusion to the linguist tradition reveals a lot about his work. One of the most important "rules" in linguistics is that words in a language are abstract. When I say the word "dog," everyone knows what I mean. But the word itself does not resemble a dog in any way. It doesn't sound like a dog, nor does it look like a dog. However, our brain understands that "dog" means a four legged canine with fur, teeth, ears, a personality, and is sometimes tame, sometimes feral, etc.
- So is Whitney's work really a sort of visual-musical language? Could we watch one of his films silently and still understand the music? Or, like language, do we have to have prior knowledge to understand it? If I had never seen a dog, never heard someone talk of a dog, never heard a dog, (despite the fact that the word "dog" is abstract), would I know what "dog" meant? Whitney's work is clearly abstract, but do we understand it as visual-music?