Astro Black Morphologies is a multimedia
exhibition of work by artists Flow Motion that
creates a dialogue between contemporary astronomy, digital art
and electronic music.
Flow Motion (artists and musicians, Eddie
George and Anna Piva) has been working
with experts in the field of astrophysics to produce this unique
and fascinating piece of work.
In 2002, scientist Phil Uttley at the University
of Southampton announced that data readings of X-ray
detritus from black hole Cygnus X-1 showed
variations which were implicitly musical in structure.
Working with Phil Uttley, Flow Motion
used the X-ray data gathered by NASA’s Rossi X-ray
Timing Explorer satellite as the basis of installations
and collaborated with astronomer Tim O’Brien
at Jodrell Bank Observatory, to convert this
data from text to audible phenomena.
Using the processed based technologies and techniques for subtracting,
reshaping, and resounding sound sources particular to granular
synthesis, Dub and electronica, Flow Motion
make audible the music of black hole Cygnus X-1.
With generative design by Adrian Ward, the
resulting installations transform Cygnus X-1’s
data into a multi-sensory experience of colour, light and sound.
The first installation is a soundscape immersed in projected
images drawn from Cygnus X-1’s light
curve. With speakers installed throughout the space, spectators
can experience the strange and beautiful music of a black hole.
The second installation will present three circular floor projections
with the treated fragments from Flow Motions
archive of cosmic sounds - the pulses of the star clusters of
Tucanae, the whistles, tweaks and spherics of Earth’s
planetary sounds – structured around voices floating in
and out of the space, reciting fragments from Cygnus
X-1’s data sequence.
This innovative experience will allow its audience to feel,
see and hear one of the most mysterious aspects of the universe,
the existence of black holes.
Astro Black Morphologies has been
funded by Arts Council England and organised
by The Arts Catalyst in association with John
Hansard Gallery - with thanks to SCAN.
The exhibition will tour to the Science Museum’s new Dana
Centre in London.
For further press information and images please email Nicky
Balfour, njb@soton.ac.uk
For information on exhibition talks, go to http://www.hansardgallery.org.uk/events/talks.html
Links
The Arts
Catalyst
Arts
Council England
SCAN
More information about Flow Motion and their
work can be found here
For more information on black holes and Cygnus X-1, visit http://www.nasa.gov
artist interview
You can watch a 30 minute video interview with
Flow Motion artists and musicians Anna Piva and Eddie George
as well as Adrian Ward and Youngjae Cho using Windows Media
Player here
Instructions on viewing the video can be found
here
BB: Dr Bernadette Buckley Head of Education
& Research, John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton
AW: Adrian Ward, Artist, and Generative Designer
EG: Eddie George (Flow Motion)
AP: Anna Piva (Flow Motion)
YC: Youngjae Cho Institute of Sound and Vibration
Research, University of Southampton
Italics: editor’s notes
BB I’d like to welcome you all to the John Hansard Gallery
this evening. Thank you all for agreeing to do an interview
for the gallery and also for agreeing to share copyright of
it with us.
Welcome to Adrian Ward, to Eddie George, to Anna Piva and to
Youngjae Cho. Adrian is the “generative designer”
involved in this project. Anna and Eddie are part of the collaboration
Flow Motion and Youngjae Cho is from the ISVR, the Institute
of Sound and Vibration Research in University of Southampton.
Perhaps I could begin by asking one of you to describe the
background to this project. How did the exhibition Astro
Black Morphologies come to be?
EG The background to the background is this. There
are two poles or blocks of concerns here which kind of intersect.
The first one is an interest in music that’s to do with
the cosmos and is also to do with the space of music –
mixological space I guess you could call it. That would
include aspects of avant garde music especially music to do
with processes like granular synthesis; the more extreme
and experimental sides of techno-electronica and dub music (less
for its generic side and more for its processes and what those
processes suggest). We were also interested in the possibilities
of the cosmos being a kind of source material for sound in itself
so those two – music of the cosmos and cosmic music –
are the two poles of music that inspired this stuff.
BB And could you say something about the particular effects
or the gathering of data leading up to the creation of the project?
Anna?
AP Astro Black Morphologies is very much a
collaborative project. It began in 2002, when we started a research
project, Sounds of Science. What we were trying to do was to
see if there were possibilities for collaborations with scientists
in sonification of scientific data and in particular, astronomical
data. Astro Black Morphologies is the first of a three
part installation series. It began with a talk that a scientist
in University of Southampton, Phil Uttley, made at the beginning
of 2002 [to the UK National Astronomy Meeting.
This talk can be found at www.ras.org.uk/html/press/pn02-09.htm.]
The talk was called ‘The Music of Black Holes’.
In this talk, Uttley announced his discovery that the patterns
of variation of X-rays from Cygnus X-1 (a black hole in the
Milky Way) corresponded to those of huge black holes in distant
galaxies. [The research was gathered by NASA's
Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer satellite. For more information
on black holes and Cygnus X-1, visit: www.nasa.gov].
Uttley and Professor Ian Mc Hardy’s research data showed
a pattern of variation which was implicitly musical. And the
same pattern of variation called ‘flicker noise’
had been found previously in many systems – from research
that began in the seventies and has continued up until now.
These systems were totally unrelated – from the currents
of the River Nile, to stock exchange variations, to human DNA,
to human behaviour and to music. This was a pattern that was
made from a mixture of variation and predictability. We found
this all very intriguing and met with Phil Uttley and he gave
us access to the data. We then began thinking about how to transform
this data into sound – how to sonify the data.
We did this with the help of another astronomer from the Jodrell
Bank Observatory, Tim O’ Brien. We devised a method for
conversion and that was the beginning of the project.
EG There’s one more thing to point out here too.
When Uttley and Mc Hardy were talking about the “music
of black holes”, if you were to have asked them to listen
to that music, you couldn’t, because the only
form that that music took was literally thousands and thousands
of numbers. So really the process of conversion begins with
those numbers and ends in this room. So [to Anna]
do you want to talk about going from the numbers to the room?
BB Yes I think viewers to the gallery would be very curious
about how this process of transformation and about how these
numbers on a page – this system of data – comes
to be converted to what we see and hear about us in the gallery.
AP Well the data itself is expressed in numbers. So
the satellite picks up a certain intensity in the x-ray output
of the data and the intensity is then expressed as a number.
The numbers are then gathered together and form what is called
a ‘light curve’. We took the numbers and converted
them in two main ways. One was as a function of volume:
So a high number would mean a loud sound. And we also converted
them as a function of pitch. So a high number means a high pitch,
a low number means a low pitch. So these were the two
main processes of conversion. And that was the beginning of
the journey because then the sonified data went through a series
of different transformations and of course then went through
a series of visual transformations with Adrian.
BB Could I ask you a little bit about that Adrian? Could you
perhaps elaborate a little on this “series of visual transformations”?
AW Yes, Anna and Eddie came to me originally about
a year ago. They were quite tricky. They came to me with a list
of numbers and they didn’t want to tell me too much about
what the numbers were for, or where they came from. They said
that they came from an x-ray and I didn’t really understand,
but it was intriguing nonetheless. So imagine being given a
list of 26,000 numbers and trying to turn it into some kind
of visuals or work with them visually. That’s a difficult
thing to do, because immediately you start thinking about ‘what’s
a black hole?’ and you can get into this stupid loop.
But I think that where we went with it was thinking more conceptually
about the numbers and what they mean and our understanding of
black holes and how it was a bit patchy –how intriguing
a process scientists often take when they’re dealing with
topics that are pretty much theoretical. And so just thinking
about that, I tried to apply a similar process to writing some
software to generate some visuals – which is what I do
on the programme really. It was kind of an interesting creative
brief. And there’s a number of ways that that’s
happened. One of the key ones was thinking about how our understanding
of black holes may not actually be representative of what’s
really out there. The problem when you write software is that
the computer is really strict and tries to understand everything.
We’re all familiar with computers crashing though, so
obviously, computers have a capability of not understanding
things. So I was interested in deliberately getting the computer
to misunderstand the numbers – it kind of goes
through a load of buffer overflows and all sorts of technical
stuff – but just to deliberately break the determinism
of those numbers. And then it’s gone through a series
of transformations – lots of different ways using similar
processes – to generate these visuals.
BB Youngjae can you say something about when you were brought
on board this project from the Institute of Sound and Vibration
Research – what your role was?
YC Yes when I first heard about this project –
an acoustical advisor was needed – I didn’t hesitate
to say ‘yes’. Because I have been researching in
acoustics at ISVR for many years now and this is a good chance
to apply my knowledge of acoustics to an art performance. I’m
very happy with being involved in that. This project, from an
acoustic point of view, means shielding one sound field from
another. So in two rooms we need at least five different sound
effects. So for this purpose, we prepared sound absorbers and
sound screens.
BB Sound absorbers?
YC Yes sound absorbers. We have sound
absorbers where there are too many reflections
(which is not desirable) and we have sound screens to shield
one sound field from another. Shielding one sound field from
another completely is impossible. But mainly we can
shield the main sound source. When I analysed the sound source
which is used for this project, the main frequency is between
600 and 1 kilohertz. So that is the target which I should try
to shield from another sound effect.
BB One of the interesting things in talking to you jointly
about this project is listening to the language that you use
to describe it. It seems that the language of the visual and
the language of the aural are becoming intertwined all of the
time. Eddie, you were talking earlier about ‘sonic landscapes’.
We have this mixing up all the time of the terms of perception.
This piece is really challenging our view of what artwork can
be and what it is. Do you agree?
EG I don’t know if it is so much a challenge
as it is an opening up – or a creating of a space
where practices and processes and discoveries from different
disciplines don’t so much dialogue as they come
together and create something that’s more than the sum
of the parts. So in practical terms we’ve used a language
of music-making to make the images, we’ve used a language
of image-making to make the music. We’ve used the metaphorising
process that Phil Uttley and Ian Mc Hardy have introduced for
the public to understand their discovery of the so-called
‘music of black holes’ to sonify. So it’s
almost a process of mixing and mixing and mixing and mixing,
until you create something that couldn’t have existed
otherwise.
AP And indeed a lot of the work in this installation
is the result of layers and layers and layers of sounds –
layers and layers and layers of images. And there is in the
images a very strong musical component. There is in the sounds,
and particularly in the use of surround-sound and separate speakers,
separate sound sources, there is a very strong preoccupation
with space – with sound in space. I think that what we
tried to achieve with this was a merging together of
the different fields into one space.
EG It’s almost as if the rhythm of the images,
the rhythm of the movies, literally sets up its own musicality.
So there’s a musicality of the images. The approach to
controlling sonic space in real space (rather than
just as a stereophonic image) has obviously got visual art correspondences.
But a ‘challenge’ for me is not the right word,
because it involves laying down a gauntlet for some ‘other’
and this is more an instance of pulling in as many voices and
processes to make something else.
BB I suppose what I was trying to get at there, was how ‘different’
this artwork is as a structure.
EG The difference for me is that cosmic space, visual
space, sonic space, the space of the body as a listening and
sound-producing entity rather than subject, has as
Anna was saying, got this very very strange fairly new connection.
There’s a line in a song called ‘Astro-Black Mythologies’
that says ‘the universe is in my voice”. What Anna
was saying about flicker noise existing in human DNA and also
in black holes – this kind of literalises that songline.
AP It would be interesting if some scientist monitored
the level of flicker noise in these images and sounds.
BB It is very much an evolving collaboration isn’t
it? One of the things that’s so interesting about the
project is the way in which different disciplines are drawn
in and different voices cross with each other. This can be perceived
as being a ‘challenge’ in the artworld because we
don’t know who to identify the ‘creation’
of work with. There isn’t a single author ‘making’
the work or a single voice associated with it. Therefore we
wonder where are the limits of this work? Where does
this work stop?
AP Well there is a certain level of invisibility
here but then again we are a part of the techno generation and
invisibility is very much a part of what we’re about.
What’s important is the work. Also our interests in working
with the invisible universe come very much from the tradition
we come from. So even black holes – I mean after all they
might not even exist…
EG …after all this …
AP …but what we were interested in, was a space
which was somehow close to invisibility, where only some traces
are detected, and what can be made of those traces.
BB But why the art-world then to produce this sound and image
in? I mean you could I suppose summarise the art-world in some
respects by saying that it’s a reification, or concretisation
of systems of looking. It lends a particular aura to the work,
before that work is even begun to be discussed. This work would
be very different if it were shown in a club for example. Why
is it important to show it in an art environment?
EG If you were to put this in a club – which
you could – if you were to put it in, I don’t know,
the Tresor club in Berlin, because there’s a very physical
poetics of reverie, that’s to do with dancing, that’s
to do with drug-taking, that’s to do with understanding
music through the body, you wouldn’t have the same contemplative
relationship to the space, and how the work figures the space.
That’s one difference. There’s no invitation to
interact in that way. We’re interested in the interplay
between the sound, the image, the space. People are free to
do whatever they want in the space but that’s one difference
basically.
BB And Adrian, can you say something about how as an assisting
artist, as a “generative designer”, you set about
elaborating this very dense brief?
AW My role is pretty difficult to define – both
in terms of my collaboration with Flow Motion and in general
in terms of what I do. Sometimes I’m called a designer,
sometimes I’m called an artist, sometimes I’m a
programmer. I think for me, just to link back to that previous
question, there is this constant diversification of how artists
are working with different materials. There’s lot of discussion
about artists as engineers or as scientists. For me, maybe it’s
the other way around – maybe it’s about engineers
are artists or scientists as artists. I think just stirring
that up – mixing it – bringing new influences in
– bringing science to an art gallery. It’s a fantastic
opportunity – it should be done more often. We can bring
design into it, we can bring sound, we can bring club and environments
– it’s fantastic. We should be doing more of that.
BB Okay and Youngjae I’m interested in your reading of
this because as someone who doesn’t participate normally
work in art-world activities, this must be a bizarre undertaking
for you, or are you simply reading it as an acoustic exercise?
YJ Well the sound we generate in space…I’m
going to raise one question here. Do you think [question
directed to the artists] you can hear the sound
in the space where this sound signal was captured?
AP I’d say no, definitely not. This is another
space and this is very much at the basis of our project –
to create a new space as opposed to a ‘representative’
space – which is one of the biggest problems of many science/art
relations and collaborations. As an artist, you’re kind
of expected to represent scientific data. This is not
a representative space. This is a space of electricity, a space
of ghosts, of ghosted sounds, a space of traces that have gone
through many different mutations. And again, maybe we chose
something that can’t be represented – like
a black hole – something that we can’t see. In a
sense it’s very challenging territory for science –
a territory in which scientists have to somehow become poets
and artists. They have to explain through metaphors. This is
when we saw the possibility for a collaboration. Because science
had already made a jump into the void through a metaphor like
the ‘music of black holes’. It is said that we need
a new physics to understand what’s inside a black hole.
So it’s a perfect space for art but it’s not a representative
space.
YC Yes this sound and this space for this exhibition
is your creation, your artistic creation, and science supports
your art.
AP Again many people think that the sounds you hear
from Jupiter, the sounds from Saturn are the actual sounds.
Well yes and no – sonification is already a conversion.
And again this is what interested us very much – the fact
that science, when it elaborates data, has to go through so
many conversions. In a sense it’s a similar process to
the art process. In the end result, it’s the sound from,
but it’s not – it’s just a sound.
BB I’m very interested in this series of on-going transformations
or movements from one form or shape to another. While listening
to you, I was wondering if this was less a space at
all and more about an event? That is, it seems to share
the structure of the ‘event’ rather than that of
the ‘space’. Would you agree? If we’re talking
about transformation, we’re talking about something that
happens in time?
AP Yes music happens in time so it’s a time-based
process. The transformation itself happened throughout the space
of more or less two years – both the visual and the sonic
ones. Through that time, we had the opportunity to apply and
to think about different methods and different processes. One
methodology (in terms of sound transformations) was the use
of dub processes. And another transformation was obtained through
granular synthesis, which in a sense works very much like science
works – where only a portion of the data, in this case,
of sonic matter, is being captured. This means that you create
empty space which can then be re-shaped, re-formed through mixing
technologies.
BB But it seems that ‘space’ itself is the great
metaphor here. I mean you talk about having to speak in metaphor
and what you seem to be shaping here, in words is the idea of
this space of alterity, which again is metaphorical.
Can we escape representation?
EG NASA had a satellite – a Rossi x-ray timing
explorer. For five years the Rossi basically recorded all this
data that provides the basis for Uttley and McHardy’s
discovery and for our work.
AP ..actually I think this was recorded in ’96…
EG Yeah but they’ve been doing it for a good
five years. NASA and its technology, by definition cannot but
not escape representation, because there’s no
other way of figuring what they do. For us to re-figure
that information and turn it into this, we have to do some violence
to it – some serious violence to it. We have to terrorise
it in a funny kind of way. It can’t live as it was. Those
numbers in this space (unless you were to lay those
thousands of pages out from end to end in these two spaces on
the floors, the walls and the ceiling) don’t actually
have any aesthetic meaning or value. So we’ve already,
by definition taken a leap off the springboard of representation,
into this. Maybe one of the reasons why this lends itself to
a collaborative process is that – we’ve got our
interests, obviously in the way that we’ve begun to outline
them here – but those interests only begin to sing in
relation to bringing other people in – acousticians, programmers-come-engineers-come-scientists
and what have you. We’re not really here to represent
that confluence of voices and presences but almost to produce
new traces from them – traces that once they’ve
been worked don’t have an immediate relationship
to their signals or sources. So it’s almost breaking
the umbilical cord of representation and pushing it into some
other place. And it’s the otherness, the spectrality,
the ghost rather than the body - that’s more important
than the fact that this once lived as a scientific discovery.
BB Fantastic. Thank you all very much for joining us and for
leading us into some very interesting discussions.
external events
Turner Sims Concert Hall
The John Hansard Gallery is also organising a one-day
symposium to accompany Astro Black Morphologies
exhibition (5 April - 14 May 2005) by Flow Motion.
This symposium comprises an exciting line-up of internationally-acclaimed
speakers from both academic and artistic worlds, and will explore
the connection between astro-physics and visual art practices
today. It will also afford delegates with the opportunity to
experience the performance piece Astro Dub Morphologies.
The symposium is scheduled to be held at the Turner
Sims Concert Hall, Highfield Campus, University of
Southampton, on 7 May. (Come back soon for further details.)
Funding
Exhibitions at the John Hansard Gallery and
WilkinsonGallery have been supported by the
The
Henry Moore Foundation.
Performances at Tate Modern have been funded by The
Felix Trust for Art.
