Digital Culture

Worlds Collide in LIGHT & SOUND
   
  By Linda Di Gusta
   

   
  At 10 PM at Lincoln Center, that Mecca for culture-conscious citizens, a special musical performance began to kick off this year’s Mostly Mozart Festival. Once can imagine the elegant concert hall, filled with expectant onlookers, light glinting off the fine wood and brass of the instruments, and the hush at the raising of the conductor’s baton…
   
  Keep imagining, dear reader, if you wish to enjoy a late concert by the Philharmonic, because in reality all eyes are on the EXTERIOR of Avery Fisher Hall, the performers are 10 computers, and Mozart’s “Jupiter” symphony coda is, well, about to be composed.
   
  Using artificial intelligence, the installation “Enlightenment” re-imagines in sound and pictures Mozart’s process during the composition of the piece. Artists Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar, Paul Kaiser drew upon notational and gestural imagery to generate the visuals on the 10 digital monitors installed on the façade. Each high-resolution screen, paired with a speaker, represents a section of the orchestra. Every cycle of the process, which ran 20 minutes at Thursday’s preview, will be unique, and they will, after resolving the coda, begin afresh 24/7 for the duration of the Festival.
   
  At a time when we question whether the solitary nature of computer operation will separate us as humans in physical space-time as much as it brings us together in cyberspace, this event on the square offers a glimmer of optimism. The cutting edge of technology came to the symphony this evening, and brought to a celebration of the quarter-millennium anniversary of the birth of a musical genius, a new and vital element of today’s visual art scene. The potential is there for bringing together whole communities of artists, scientists, and all who love progress, adventure and creativity. Perhaps it is best put in the artists’ statement for “Enlightenment” - “By peering at Mozart’s Age of Enlightenment through the new lenses of the Information Age, we might see both eras anew.”
   
 

resolve40 © all rights reserved 2006