The sound of images

These workshops aimed to familiarize participants with the process whereby contemporary reality can become the inspiration for an art-work and a musical composition which end up being combined into a piece of video art.

The first session (16/1) focused on the visual arts. Everyday life becomes fruitful material for a work employing comic strip techniques, collages and video. In the second session (23/1), the group used improvisation to create music to accompany the cinematic material created in the first meeting, and learned how contact microphones attached to everyday objects, modified electronic games, improvised circuits and high definition digital technology can be used to produce sound. In the third and last meeting (30/1), the group combined the videos with their musical accompaniment and discovered the relationship between visual narrative and music in the process—a relationship which lies at the heart of the video used in “Goya-Beethoven: The Path to Silence”, in which parallels are drawn between the two great artists’ paintings and musical compositions which stem both from the era in which they lived and from parallels in their personal lives. The group was also given the chance to take an interactive approach to selected works by Goya and Beethoven, which familiarized them with the subject-matter of the performances on February 5 & 6.