The Complementarity of Music and Visual Art
• Categorization: Genre & Sub-genre what is the work background / setting, mood / tone, theme or topic? How does it comment? Does it fit or is it unique?
John Whitney Sr. (1917-1995) was a mathematical structure visual animator in the mid-1960s. Whitney was first granted artist-in-residence status by the IBM Los Angeles Science Center in 1966. Whitney was commissioned to explore the expressive possibilities offered by the IBM Model 360 computer and the IBM 2250 graphical display console. By the 1970s, Whitney had abandoned analog computers in favor of faster digital processes. The pinnacle of his digital cinema was his 1975 work “Vine Pattern,” which featured psychedelic, blooming forms of color.
• Form and Function; interpreting meaning and relating it to the format, or presentational mode (What are the artist objectives and limitations?)
Whitney explores the methods of “harmonic events in audiovisual presentations” in this work, where musical progression can be simulated by the superposition of rhythms of multiple objects to create symmetries and counterpoints like notes and rhythms in music. “In the arrangement, each point moves at a different rate and in independent directions according to the laws of nature, their movements produce a phenomenon equivalent to musical harmony. When these points reach some numerical relation (harmonics) with the other parameters of the equation, they form the basic pattern.”
• Process: The techniques, materials and technologies applied within the work and the relationships between message and medium, (Does process, technique or tool become the message?)
In Arabesque, Whitney combines the use of a computer and an oscilloscope to create a series of transformed sine waves and parabolic curves to complement Manouchehr Sadeghi’s exotic Persian Santur soundtrack. Notably, Whitney was influenced by Islamic architectural patterns, their symmetry, and modulation resembling temporal patterns in complex musical motifs.
• Formal Elements; Use of space, composition, Light & colour, movement, rhythm, timing, pacing, transition and audio relationships. (does the work investigate these or other formal elements?)
Whitney focused on creating music-like structures in dynamic visual form, rather than mapping sound to image. Whitney summarized his model of trying to understand the structure of time in terms of computing periods and harmonic consistency of periodic functions. He wrote: Rhythm, beat, frequency, pitch, and intensity are periodic parameters of music. There is a set of similar parameters that make up the graph field; This is as effective and rich as its corresponding vocal domain. The visual domain is also defined by parameters that are periodic in nature.