On view through Fri 12/21
Go to the Sculpture Center soon to view Animal Warmth No 64, an exhibit by builder, composer and performer Ali Momeni.
About: Animal Warmth No 64, a minimal installation of only carbon filament bulbs, timed movements of light, and composed sound, startles, perplexes, and entrances visitors. The term “animal warmth” had a brief flare as a serious concept in music criticism in the early twentieth century, particularly in describing music by such composers as Ernst Bloch and Arnold Schoenberg. It is now a witty phrase used by composers of non-melodic, atonal modern and contemporary music, usually electronic or computer generated, when they want to soften and humanize a section of their piece.
With a fourteenth century multi-voiced choral piece as the background, Momeni has composed computer generated music that selects notes from the singing and turns them into atonal sounds that are linked to the light bulbs. Each two bulbs in the line of sixty have a sound associated with them.
Flashing with light that also warms the bulbs, they ring with a unique pure tone as they come to life and fade out. With real-time software, the music and lights express a never-ending, never-repeating variety of moods. These moods span synchrony and asynchrony, phasing, rhythmic correspondence, and trickery. The bulbs’ frequencies shift with the tonal and luminous moods of the installation.
Way cool.