2011 – SYMPHONIES OF IMAGES AND SOUNDS

“Through the centuries of art’s history, where everything is comparable and referable to someone, and has therefore already been done, already seen, I understood that the true difference between one visual artist as opposed to another resides in his primary sign, that which is born on the page of a notebook, he who has the courage to be the first to break the equilibrium of the white. The fragility of the sign affects many frames of mind, including music. How important is what you are listening to whilst drawing? But what if it was what you were drawing that emitted a sound?”, wrote Danilo Bucchi, setting in motion the idea of a performative project in collaboration with Giuseppe Stagnitta (art psychologist), Paolo Giliberti Panettoni (feedback and software programmer) and Gerardo Greco (sound designer), four artists that come from different experiences that utilise multimedia modes of expression, in image and sound. The idea is that of activating a “collective creative process”single great body“hyperbody”“Symphony” that will develop, horizontally, through the contribution of the individual instruments, and vertically, thanks to the sum of the artistic styles in the coordinate of time, in this way giving life to a real Symphony of Images and Sounds

The primary objective the group is aiming for is that of capturing the creative moment of the painter, to have it explode in the here and now of creation, in its fullness of emotion and meanings, on various stylistic levels through that expressive and communicative synthesis characterized by performance.

Danilo Bucchi creates a work improvising, extemporaneously, with the help only of the sign (the artist’s identity) on a glossy support, placed on a sheet of Plexiglas where a camera is inserted. The image captured by the camera goes in two directions: one is projected in high resolution onto a screen at the back and the other enters into the console of Paolo Giliberti Panettoni. Which captures the visual sign, transforming it, through a digital process (using bespoke software based on Danilo Bucchi’s sonic imagination and sonic suggestions linked to his sign), into sound. Precisely the “sound of the image”.
The musical creation of the performance is entrusted to Gerardo Greco and Rossano Baldini. The first is the central catalyser of every variation, that is to say any sound arrives at his station, so it can be modified, composed and decomposed. The second composes and develops the musical ideas, the themes, the sensations and the sonic cells, intervening with the piano, in order to finally complete the creative process in music, brought to a close and ready to restart in an infinite exchange.
The images are transformed into sound through the software that creates a feedback between the variable “sign in movement” and “sound”. The sounds of the image are the base, the input for the musicians’ real-time composition.
The movement of the sign on the glossy transparent surface is captured by the camera and transformed into a Midi (“Music Instrument Digital Interface”) signal. This signal is controlled by Paolo Giliberti Panettoni, who channels the Midi score in real-time, sent to him and created by Bucchi’s sign, sending it outwards towards Gerardo Greco’s console, in order to create a true sound, ready to be enriched by Rossano Baldini’s creations.
The technology used to create the feedback utilizes high resolution video cameras, as the hardware and software devices, which elaborate the image and orchestrates the creative feedback, were designed to process an enormous quantity of data, with, therefore, a high quality of visual, and consequently audio and perceptive, definition.
In this performance, the video is a limpid and linear element like pure inspiration. Technically, the computer analyses the moment, ignoring the drawing and recently created sign; in fact, through a precise technical setting, the system makes the drawing disappear, giving room and importance to the tract being created in that instant, in the projection, in the sound and, obviously, in the painter’s creative moment.
The sign, in classical painting, flows dynamically on a surface, which is the material support destined to receive the content of the work, normally a canvas. The work, therefore, results in being limited by two horizontal lines and two vertical lines.
In this case, the execution, and consequently the fruition, of the art is in movement; blocked neither by a canvas nor by the confines of a screen in which the images simply move. The sign leaves the two-dimensional surface of the canvas and three-dimensionality of the moving image, to be experienced together with the sound that it emits. A sign experienced in the here and now of its creative moment. It is as though we were able use/elicit, through this machine (a new form of the communication of art), that which the painter really experiences in the instant in which he creates the sign on the canvas, in that moment of the experience of creation in its entirety: a complete sign of his muscular effort/tension, of his movement, his direction, of imaginary sound, of the sound emitted in the imagination of the artist.

I would like to conclude this introduction with a reflection on the nature of the sign and imaginary sound by a great artist of the Twentieth Century, Wassily Kandinsky: “It is colour and form that posses an interior sonority, that is transmitted perceptively through the painting, beyond the fact that this represents objects, a story, a landscape, or constructs a world of autonomous forms that are completely separate from natural phenomena.”
The theme of tension is central in all forms of artistic expression, from the figurative arts, to theatre and music. For this reason, Wassily Kandinsky, in Point and Line to Plane (1926) underlined the importance of tensions and I with him, adding that the images of artworks evoke essentially corporeal tensions, that are successively projected onto the original image.
In this sense, I believe that Imaginary sound is the product of the experience of the psychomotorial act in which the artists immerses himself, during the process that ends in the sign. Corporeal experience that is translated into sonic experience, like a sonic representation of the motorial act, in the moment of the movement/externalization of the creative experience that flows into the pure sign.
Anybody never to have seen a musical instrument, an inhabitant of another planet for example, would have difficulty in imagining that such richness of sounds could be born from the movement of strings of different lengths and different thicknesses: of strings of different tensions! The body has more muscles than a harp has strings! The muscles of the body play for their possessor. Music corresponds to subjective experiences generated by the game of muscular tensions.
The variations of tensions, and the reafferent and synthesized activity, generate the different sensations-feelings: of lightness, heaviness, anger, etc… a stimulus that elicits lightness within us, produces an experience of lightness through the modification of tensions that we successively project onto the stimulus itself (Vezio Ruggeri, 2002).
The essential characteristic of the line is the intervention of one or more external forces that allow the passage from immobility to dynamism. Therefore, in this there exist a tension (virtual force) and a direction (force taking place).
With the sign, therefore, an act of communication begins, of externalization of personal meanings…where the signifier triggers a communicative chain process… A chain of meanings (both emotive and of content) that continuously unify the artist and user according to a precise pattern that has a precise formula: moment/creative act of the artist – expression/communication of the meaning through the signifier – perception – imitative decoding (empathy) – user. The infinite chain of the creative process.

Giuseppe Stagnitta