Caracterización de los emplazamientos

In the arts, synaesthesia is frequently alluded to where a work crosses multiple media. is is not intended to be an automatic process as with clinical synaesthesia, but the extension of an artistic theme across modalities, in order to create a rich experience. At times this may seem a mundane aspiration dressed in the clothes of psychological disorder. It is aer all normal to be able to both see and hear an action in perceptual unity; modes of perception are by nature integrated. Interest comes however where technology allows modalities to be related in a novel manner.

e phrase algorithmic synaesthesiais coined by Dean et al. (2006) to describe artistic at- tempts to connect vision and sound (or more specifically, film and music) using digital com- puters. e wordalgorithmis used rather loosely, to indicate any use of computers to connect modalities, even if this only amounts to sharing of data between outputs; artistic license is applied to both terms of the algorithmic-synaesthetic juncture.

Dean et al. (2006) report several interesting approaches to cross-modal integration in per- formance. However we treat with scepticism their claim that the addition of a computer nec- essarily brings mixed media into a new realm. ey state that their new digital ‘algorithmic synaesthesia’ is more precise than past analogue efforts, but it is not clear why; if we are con- cerned with art that plays with analogue perception, then surely an analogue approach would notionally be more precise. Instead we see computational developments as a continuation of an ever-present tendency for artists to look for new correspondences between perceptual do- mains, through both analogue and digital means.

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e use of mixed media in the arts is not new, and technology has been employed for centuries in finding novel ways to connect the senses. For example the inventor Mary Hallock- Greenewalt developed a colour organ (as in, a keyboard instrument to ‘play’ colour projections) in a bid to realise her conception ofNourathar, an artform based on fluctuating transpositions of brightness and hue, with a scoring system to unite it with musical staff notation (Greenewalt, 1946). Many colour organists, Hallock-Greenewalt included, have presumed their colour organs to be novel, however experiments in this area have been a longstanding theme before and since. Light shows and video displays have become an integral part of the live music stage, from the psychedelic light shows of the 1960s to contemporary live generative visual art. e laer is exemplified by United Visual Artists (UVA), who began by creating stage visuals to accompany and react to the live music of Massive Aack in 2003. UVA have since brought their work to national galleries in the form of interactive installation art. e artistic focus of both the work of Hallock-Greenewalt and UVA is the fusing of modes into an whole, audio-visual experience. Hallock-Greenewalt invented analogue electric components to support her work, and UVA work with digital computation, but the artist John Whitney is a case of an artist who has worked through both analogue and digital technology. Whitney produced experimental films from the 1950s, first using hand drawn animation, then analogue computers and in later years digital computers as they became available (Youngblood, 1970, pp. 207–228). ere is lile discontinu- ity between his works as he progresses from analogue to digital methods; all are explorations of form through geometry. e biggest difference is in the amount of time taken to produce the films, a decade for his first hand drawn film, but much less for his later works. e depth of his first digitally produced filmArabesque(1975) is breathtaking, the influence of his earlier analogue approaches still showing in leading the viewer’s perception to an experience that is both abstract and coherent. is continuity is shown too in the development of programming languages for music; in particular Miller Puckee has said he thinks of his Patcher languages (§5.3.1) as more like analogue synthesisers than programming languages (Lewis, 1993). We will have much more to say about analogue representation in the notation of computer programs in chapter 5.

Digital computers too oen lead artists into a trap of applying digital transformations to data without consideration of the analogue source and destination of the data, ultimately lead- ing to output that human perception cannot decode. While this is not always the case, analogue methods tend towards straightforward mapping between two quality dimensions in a straight- forward, perceptually salient manner. Digital methods on the other hand can too easily result in transformations divorced from human perceptual processing, such as reading an image as a one dimensional scan-line, as Dean et al. (2006) report of the MetaSynth soware. e result is

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too oen perceptually incomprehensible. Nonetheless at particular scales humans have strong acuity for recognising discrete paerns, and indeed we will assert that this is an important aspect of music cognition in§4.4.

e work of Whitney shows how the analogue and digital aspects of a work support one another, and also that while electronic computers are oen extremely convenient, they are not necessary. ere are dangers in working with electronic computers, in that by not taking full consideration of orientational metaphor, or coherent paern, the results of digital trans- formation are likely to be incomprehensible. However we should certainly not downplay the potential importance of computer languages in a rich creative process, a subject we will explore in chapter 6.