DC -- American University -- Katzen Arts Center -- 2015B Spring I Exhibit: Transcription of Blue: Guy Goldstein:
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- Description of Pictures: Transcription of Blue: Guy Goldstein
April 4 through May 24, 2015
As both a visual artist and musician, I am fascinated by the transitions between media -- attempts to convert and translate actions through one medium to another. This project continues my ongoing occupation with the relationship between sound and image.
In this body of work, I convert drawings to sound, and vice versa, using software that is based on an old cumbersome machine from 1940s Russia. The software makes it possible to obtain a visible image of a sound wave. It also synthesizes a sound from an artificially drawn sound spectrogram.
First, I draw "sonic codes" which look like scores or large scale drawings that represent the spectrum of the frequencies in a sound. I then convert these drawings to sound. The software creates animated films with the images from the drawings and its own sound. My process references old school sound artists and sound animators from the 1930s, like Arseny Avraamov (Russia) and Oskar Fischinger (Germany). It also references Norman Mclaren (Canada) from the 1950s, who tried to draw sound, animate graphic shapes into sound, and create animated films with the results.
Once I have the sound of the drawings, I perform it by playing the bass. Sometimes I invite other musicians to perform and play live with the drawing's sound in the background. Thus, a dialogue of harmony, melody, rhythm, and sound is created out of acoustic, digital, and analog instruments and tools.
While creating the drawings, I use various drills, equipped with graphite and pencils instead of drill bits. The sound and vibrations of the drill are transmitted onto the paper as rich patterns and textures. I then use tape to transfer these textures to a different part of the drawing or to other drawings. The graphite sticks to the tape so that I can arrange the textures on the drawing. I edit and layer the tapes as voiceprints, graphic notations, or spectrographs.
Finally, I convert the sound of the drawings back to images again, using the same software. The final result is a ghost of my images, inverted black and white distortions of my original drawings.
My works do not reveal the tools with which they were created. The viewer can "see" the music, hear the sound, feel the frequency through the drawings, and can recognize a process the work has gone through, but the viewer cannot name the tools or the techniques I used.
My tools are now more focused and I approach my art with more simplicity. This allows me to create a language that, in time, becomes clearer. The more I create and "sharpen" my tools, the more I can put together meaningful combinations of visual, conceptual, and emotional experiences.
—Guy Goldstein from an interview with Barbara London, a New York-based curator and writer at Brooklyn Rail
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- Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
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- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- KATGOL_150404_01.JPG: Transcription of Blue: Guy Goldstein
- Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
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- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].
