Visible Bits, Audible Bytes Retrospective

Phoenix has hosted ten episodes of Visible Bits, Audible Bytes (VBAB) since 2010, bringing extraordinary audiovisual artwork from around the globe to Leicester audiences. This retrospective presents a selection of works from these screenings.  

Presented by De Montfort University’s Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, VBAB has focused on what is sometimes called ‘visual music’ or ‘video music’. In these works, sound and image are often treated as equals, or moving image is shaped with a musical sensibility. Many of the works are abstract, exhibiting carefully sculpted relationships between sonic and visual shapes, textures and behaviours — rather than conventional narrative.  

In part, this tradition originates in the rise of abstract art and ‘absolute film’ in the early 20th century, wherein artists aspired to make visual materials function in a musical fashion. Well into the 20th century, artists working in this realm often exhibited courageous vision and extensive investment of labour, including the invention of new film or sound technologies to realise their visions.   

In contrast, global culture is now saturated with the audiovisual, enabled by widely available digital tools. Film credit-sequences and advertising sometimes even reflect aspects of the visual-music tradition. Large teams executing these works can achieve a level of complexity and polish that may be out-of-reach for non-commercial artists.  

Yet individual artists or small teams still strive to create and share intimate, unique and powerful audiovisual expressions of their inner worlds. From the playful to the profound, their work continues to reveal new frontiers in the unification of sound and image. 

Curated by Prof Bret Battey of DMU’s Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre.

IMAGE CREDIT: Still from Sebastiano Gualtieri’s Output 2 (2020)

Myriam Boucher, Nuées [2016] 

Nuées is a videomusic work that arose from the idea of flapping wings. The recordings were made with the baritone saxophonist Ida Toninato in an immense, deserted and reverberant space at night. The birds were recorded mid-flight. 

Composer and video artist Myriam Boucher merges the organic and the synthetic in her mesmerizing videomusic installations, immersive projects and audiovisual performances. A keyboardist turned visual artist working on the real-time dialogue between music and images, Boucher initially gravitated towards classical piano, jazz and then post-rock, before learning about, and then academically pursuing electroacoustics. She is Professor in Composition and Digital Music at the Faculté de musique of Université de Montréal. Her research-creation activities integrate musical composition, improvisation, deep listening, sound ecology, site-specific creation, immersive technologies, and cross-disciplinary arts such as cinema, visual arts, poetry, and dance within interdisciplinary groups.  

David Arango Valencia, Débridement Gold [2018]  

“There is a crack, there is a crack in everything – That’s how the light gets in” – Leonard Cohen 

David Arango Valencia is a composer specialising in acousmatic music and video-music, with a strong interest in field recording. He currently works in video game audio, focusing on technical audio integration and sound design. David studied composition at Université de Montréal with Michel Tétreault, Martin Bédard, Robert Normandeau and Jean Piché. 

Katie Finn (animation) and Joseph Sims (sound), e(mi) [2022] 

e (mi) explores contemporary and historical aesthetics of visual-music, displaying a variety of gestural and textural sound-image relationships. The focus was to create even hierarchical status in both the visuals and sound. This was achieved by each artist influencing both mediums at every stage of the creation. The macro and mezzo structures were determined by a visual score, while gestural energy and textures were realized through the sonic material.  

Katie Finn specialises in 2D hand drawn animation. She pursues unique aesthetic frameworks to portray the subjects she finds personally meaningful. She lives and works in Montreal. 

Joseph Sims lives and works in Montreal. He studied Electroacoustics at Concordia University (2022). Specialising in sound design for visual media and acousmatic composition, his compositional approach emphasizes the kinetic potential of sound organisation. His work is internationally award winning and has been presented in Canada, Italy, Barcelona, Argentina, and Mexico. 

Line Katcho, Simulacre [2016] 

Exploring a tight and precise synchronization between image and sound, Simulacre is an audiovisual work in which complex visual structures counterpoint uncluttered musical arrangements. It highlights the relationship between broken and continuous dialogue and suggests a reversed spatial approach between image and sound: two-dimensional visual spaces are associated with structured musical units showing much relief, while the three-dimensional visual spaces are presented with uniform arrangements showing very little scale. 

Line Katcho is a composer and new media artist from Montreal. Primarily interested in sound and image as demonstrations of motion, forces or gestures, she also distinguishes herself through an affinity for perceptual games, and a talent for use of affect. Radiating a narrative and cinematic feel, her work is driven and provocative, fusing reference to abstraction and experimentation to tradition. Leaning towards a mixing of styles, genres and applied methods, her empirical approach aims at creating a sensory and cathartic experience, rooted in expression, in pursuit of authenticity. Besides her signature shows, she actively VJs and produces music and visuals in fields such as contemporary dance, video gaming and film. 

Félix Bonjour, Survol [2019] 

Survol adopts for itself the adage that ‘nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed’ and traces this cycle of evolution using a minimalist and contemplative visual. The primary motif lives, multiplies and evolves towards a more complex organic model. This meeting of ecosystems will impact the evolution of the pattern towards a whole that has become inseparable and continues to transform. Through this work, Félix Bonjour explores the symbiotic possibilities of sound and image in their full digital dimension through work focused on micro-editing. The musical environment was created after the visual one, thus making it possible, thanks to a strong synchronism between these two mediums, to bring depth to the message conveyed. 

Now based in Paris, Félix Bonjour divides his time between sound and visual creation, exploring the possibilities of these different media with a special focus on the relationship between sound and image. He moved to Montreal in 2016 to pursue a bachelor’s degree in digital music at the University of Montreal. A few years later, in January 2018, he co-founded Isotone, a digital arts studio formed by four audiovisual artists. Their work is defined by experimentation, exploring the vast potential of digital arts through diverse experiences in related fields .

Asher Arnon (Israel), Roundabout Midday [2012] 

A twelve-minute shot of traffic flow fragmented and arranged as a polyphony of  accelerating and decelerating sonic and visual gestures. The composition leans on two organising systems – the roundabout that restricts directions and speeds and the grid of juxtaposed fragments that reveals boundless possibilities of flows within these constraints. 

Asher Arnon is an interdisciplinary creator artistically active in the intersection of visual, spatial and sound-oriented arts. In recent years his practical and theoretical research has focused on exploring possibilities for place representation through interrelations between image and music and the notion of ‘sense of place’. He constructs works aimed to evoke a sense of place experience through orientation as a form of interpretation, ranging from an embodied perception of spatial, visual and sonic phenomena to understanding their causal, cultural, political or subjective context. 

Arnon is a retired Professor of Creative Arts at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Israel. He has a PhD in Audiovisual Installation Art from the Music, Technology and Innovation – Institute for Sonic Creativity (MTI2) at De Montfort University; an MA in Architecture and Urban Culture from the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain and a B.Des in Graphic Design from Bezalel. Arnon also studied in the jazz department of the Rimon School of Jazz & Contemporary Music in Israel. He plays a tenor saxophone and is deeply interested in improvisation as a mode of orientating and its application in creative processes and everyday life. 

Fransesc Marti (Spain), Speech 2 [2015] 

Speech 2 is an experimental audiovisual piece created from a series of old clips from the US broadcast public affairs interview program The Open Mind. This piece is reflection on the action of communicating, highlighting its limitations, and can be labelled as ‘text-sound-art’ in an audiovisual sampling framework. Technically, in this piece the author has been experimenting how granular sound synthesis techniques and pseudorandom number generator algorithms can be used for audio-visual creative works. The original movies are cut, mixed, manipulated and reassembled, generating new images and sonorities. No other sound samples or images have been used to create the final result. 

Francesc Martí is a digital media artist and composer born in Barcelona and currently living in China. His practice includes multichannel audiovisual installations, generative art, digital painting, and audiovisual composition. His work particularly explores the application of mathematics to shape artistic form, compose multimedia structures, and drive the creative process with algorithmic precision and artistic experimentation.   

His work has been exhibited and displayed in more than 20 countries, in numerous international exhibitions and concerts at venues such as The Hermitage Museum (Cyberfest), ZKM (Insonic), the Museu Nacional da República (The International Meeting #18Art, Brazil), and the Sonar Festival (Spain), to name a few.   

He completed his PhD in audiovisual composition at De Montfort University. Currently, he combines his artistic projects with teaching in the BA (Hons) Digital Media Arts program at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA), at ICI, located in China.   

João Pedro Oliveira (Portugal/USA), Tesseract [2017] 

A tesseract, also defined as a hypercube, is the four-dimensional equivalent of the cube. This video presents a possible journey throughout the six faces of a cube, and how they can be transformed and projected into a tesseract using different processes: translation, rotation, fragmentation, explosion and implosion, etc. 

Portuguese-born composer Professor João Pedro Oliveira holds multiple degrees in various areas, in architecture (BS, Lisbon School of Fine Arts, 1981), organ performance (Superior Degree, Gregorian Institute, Lisbon, 1985), music theory (MA, SUNY/Stony Brook, 1988), and composition (MA, 1987 and PhD, 1990, SUNY/Stony Brook). From 1985 to 1990, he was a Fulbright Scholar in the US, and simultaneously held a fellowship from the Gulbenkian Foundation, a Portuguese foundation that supports the arts, sciences, and education. He is currently Corwin Chair of Composition at UC Santa Barbara Department of Music, USA. 

Oliveira’s music explores multiple facets of the interaction between acoustic instruments and electronic sounds and, further, relationships between sound and images. His works include over 150 compositions published in various countries (opera, orchestral and choral, chamber music, solo instrumental pieces, tape/electroacoustic works, video, music for public spaces, orchestrations and arrangements). 

Sebastiano Gualtieri (Italy), Output 2 [2020] & AV16 [2021] 

These works are the outputs of a generative process: a system produces unpredictable results, then the best ones are refined and assembled in the final structure. This process takes advantage of computers to generate outputs otherwise unimaginable by humans (because of muscle memory limitations, sedimented habits and clichés or just technical reasons). The generative process sometimes outputs only materials, other times entire sections, sometimes only audio parts to which video is added, other times the opposite. Human input is always dominant (because we still are, for the time being, the addressees of the final work). The goal is to make sense of the aesthetic implications of computers. 

Sebastiano Gualtieri studied Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague (NL), audiovisual composition at De Montfort University in Leicester (UK) and philosophy at Birkbeck College in London (UK). He is mainly interested in audiovisual composition as ‘organized sound and image’, recognizing time as their only true link, in 3D diegetic spaces where sound and image connect through meaning, and in procedural systems that leverage computers to expand human imagination. 

Max Hattler, Director (Germany/UK/Hong Kong) &  Eduardo Noya Schreus, Sound and Music (Canada), X [2012] 

The unknown X becomes a whole symphony of shapes… In a kinetic energetic otherworld where everything is by itself yet can intersect with each other, cross-action seems the best way to solve an unknown equation. This work is the film festival version of the Max Hattler KXFS Canal Commission, a water screen projection commissioned by KXFS and Vauxhall, presented on Regent’s Canal in London in September 2012.  

Animation by Matt Abbiss, Tony Comley, Valeria Fonseca, Max Hattler, Siobhan McElhinney, and Luiz Stockler.  

Max Hattler is a German artist, researcher, curator and educator who works with abstract animation, video installation and audiovisual performance. He holds a master’s degree from the Royal College of Art and a Doctorate in Fine Art from the University of East London. Max’s work has been shown at festivals and institutions such as Resonate, Ars Electronica, ZKM Center for Art and Media, MOCA Taipei and Beijing Minsheng Museum. Awards and mentions include Annecy, Prix Ars Electronica, Punto y Raya Festival, London International Animation Festival, Vienna Shorts, and several Visual Music Awards. Max has performed live around the world including at Fest Anca, Anifilm Festival, Playgrounds Festival, Expo Milan, Seoul Museum of Art and the European Media Art Festival. He lives in Hong Kong where he is a tenured Associate Professor at School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Max’s research focuses on synaesthetic experience, visual music, optical sound, the narrative potential of abstract animation, and expanded artistic approaches to binocular vision. 

Eduardo Noya Schreus is also known as ‘NOIA’, specialises in unconventional approaches to composition, working mainly with synthesizers and acoustic instruments to provide textured, layered, and evocative instrumentation. He has worked widely in film sound tracks. In 2018 Eduardo scored the music for the French drama Philharmonia, which aired on UK’s Channel 4 among other platforms. Noya has designed soundscapes for animated projections at Showcase Illumination Project:National Arts Centre (NAC) Ottawa(2017), Canada and the King’s Cross Filing Station in London, in addition to the official trailers for the 2013 Animatou international animation film festival. His scores for animator Max Hattler’s work won him awards in the categories of Best Canadian Audio-Visual Composer and Best Soundtrack.