Aug 27, 2022
transmedial blue quantized wave
lecture performance at contemporary music festival ‘Ya’
In 2016 I started a longtime project about a wave. Since then it has continously shifted in space & time and has been composed across different media: It has passed through photography, machinelearning, southindian-counting, social media, contemporary music, a design magazine and a radio show. Always oscillating between concept and experience.
In August 2022 I did a lecture performance in Dreifaltigkeits-Church, Essen Borbeck (Germany) at Ya Festival for contemporary music and presented the journey so far. As a reference to the festival location, the B.O.R.Back Oscillator (Borbeck Oriented Recursion) illustrated the position of the wave: its origin, here and now. See some extracts of the pre/post composed materials from winkler.works Instagram slides on YouTube:
In the lecture performance, the following aspects of the wave were presented:
1. YA DRONE OF DRONES / / / SOUND
2. TRANSMEDIAL WAVE / / / EXPERIENCE
3. B.O.R.BACK OSCILLATOR / / / CONCEPT
4. QUANTIZED BLUE /// TEXT
5. MOSAIC DRONES /// SOFTWARE
6. KEINE Z.A.I.T (NO TIME) /// (FAILING)
7. PAX /// CONCERT
Due to the reading focus of Medium.com, it makes sense to re-publish the text of part 4. QUANTIZED BLUE here in english, too [published in german here and on manx blog]:
QUANTIZED BLUE
The sea is blue. Also in memory. We live in a time of gigantic cloud storage and continuous data transformations …
In 2016 I converted all my private digital photos to black and white to recalibrate my perception of ‘transience’. Among the discolored pictures were some from vacation at the North Sea:
Even without a media anchor, the blue of the sea has not faded in my sensual memory. In 2021, artificial intelligence enabled a further transformation here: Using an ‘image colorization deep learning model’, the sea was dreamed blue again by machine:
At least 3 blues could now be counted: mine, which I internalized directly from experience, the one in the original photo and the digital neural-learned — not to mention the other subjective blue mixtures and the objectively measurable blue. So there had to be a lot.
In the next step, I ruthlessly reduced this multidimensional blue to 17 discrete RGB values and composed them via animation and music as sea and sound wave: 17 xylophones are polyrhythmically superimposed (1:1 to 17:1) along a whole-tone scale to create a breaking blue ‘wave chord’. Thus, the blue now also had a temporal and harmonic expansion — but it certainly always had:
From the older (discolored) blues I created further collages and built digital windmills, which are also blown on personally — because without a trigger there is no wave:
When I dream of that North Sea holiday today, there is a past, present and future blue. Colors can come and go too. Thank you dear A.I. for the gentle, inspiring cooperation — gladly again in a similar form!
thanks also to:
the ocean, the curators of ya-festival, manx design, gesellschaft für neue musik ruhr, jim igor kallenberg, wdr 3 studio neue musik, netzwerk konnakol deutschland, anushaant nayinai wijayan, melanie gardemann, rafael reina.
