kurimanzutto - Carlos Amorales at OPA

Carlos Amorales at OPA | Guadalajara, Mexico

05-23-08

Psicofonias
Carlos Amorales and Julian Léde

opening may 23

OPA | Guadalajara, Mexico
may 23 - august 29, 2008

Installation of black and white two-channel video connected to a MIDI system, two floating screens, sound system, unlimited time.
One channel video, colour, soundless, 3 minutes, loop.
50 music scores of cut black paper pasted on white paper, 63.5 x 45.8 cm. each.

For the first time in Guadalajara, the artist Carlos Amorales presents a new body of work, based on the research about mechanical music composition realized by Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997) during the second part of the last century. This North-American composer was based in Mexico City since 1940 until his death. In his musical work, he developed a score system, transcribed in paper rolls for pianola, gradually perforated in order to give shape to a series of compositions performed not by a musician but by the very same machine. The type of composition created by Nancarrow differs from the classical music notation, approaching its procedure towards a more visual form. In fact, Nancarrow wrote words perforating the paper after listening to their sound.

Following Nancarrow’s composition logic, Carlos Amorales along with the musician Julian Lede, and the digital programmer Andre Pahl have developed an interface that is equivalent to the pianola. This interface is able to interpret musically the vectorial drawings that conform an archive of more than 1500 images (employed by Amorales since 1999 in his graphic work). The sound produced by such interface/pianola is originated from the percussion of the drawing nodes with the musical scale. This becomes expressed randomly as music. The meaning of such translation of the drawing into sound marks a step in Carlos Amorales

production, in which the visual language is transformed. His horror drawings acquire then a new sense purely abstract.

The installation at OPA — based on the image of the city at night that could be seen by darkening the glass of the building’s windows — also includes 50 scores, which are black paper cuttings images, similar to the ones that conform the interface, and a second animation-video (installed in a second space) based on the transitions between scenes often used in film.


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