Melodic Group Shapes
This animation was based on British composer Daphne Oram’s composition Melodic Group Shapes. Oram was a pioneer in electronic music during the 1950s. She was interested in the relationship between music and and images, and created the Oramics Machine. The Oramics Machine was a device that translated drawings into sound.
The animation was created by incrementally moving woodblock type on the bed of a Vandercook press, printing the type, and then moving the type again. The prints were captured by photographing the images laid down on a copy stand, and compiling them into a video using iStopMotion.
Color and Rhythm
I am interested in how letterforms can become abstract shapes and create repeating patterns. By abstracting letterforms, meaning is stripped away from the very basis of verbal language and in turn the shapes morph into pure form and color. In this work I investigate how letterforms can create new shapes when they overlap with other letterforms, and how these shapes change as some letterforms move across the page while others remain static. I created ‘Color and Rhythm’ in order to explore these ideas, and to exploit the possibility of moving handset type incrementally in order to create a sense of motion.
Artists books are an ideal way of engaging haptic visuality because of the way that they often must be handled in order to be truly understood. In ‘Color and Rhythm’ you must physically flip the pages in order to see how the composition moves and changes from page to page. But I was not only interested in engaging the visual and tactile senses; I was also thinking about sound.
Wassily Kandinsky studied the relationship between music, abstract shapes and color. He was interested in the way music could express emotion without any verbal cues. He believed that shape and color could convey universal emotions in the same way that music does. Time is an intrinsic formal element in music, animation, and books. Consequently, by adding the element of time to the abstract compositions in the flipbooks through animation, I am interested in further exploring the connections between sound, shape and color. The visual rhythm of repeating letterforms and shapes within letterforms corresponds to musical rhythm. As such, this work seeks to create a kind visual music.