Live Visuals, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 19 Issue 3
ISBN: 978-1-906897-22-2
ISSN: 1071-4391
Volume Editors: Lanfranco Aceti, Steve Gibson and Stefan Müller Arisona
Editor: Ozden Sahin
Of Minimal Materialities And Maximal Amplitudes: A Provisional Manual Of Stroboscopic Noise Performance
by Jamie Allen
To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter.
— Karl Marx [1]
The various techniques available to contemporary multimedia performers congeal, on occasion, into a set of related tools, techniques, and apparent motivations that one might characterize as a genre or scene. More often than not, in technologized audiovisual performance, these differentiable aesthetics and styles emerge with the introduction of a particular new media technology capability (see ‘electronic music’ and ‘computer music’ as examples of this). New tools beget new aesthetics and timbres, and software and hardware advances allow for more bits-per-second, more particles-per-frame, and more computing power-per-square-centimeter. Likewise and meanwhile, although more exceptionally, performance tools and styles also arise that are somewhat resistant to these vectors of technological progress.
[1] K. Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843),” in Marx: Early Political Writings(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 64.
Full article is available for download as a pdf here.
Volume 19 Issue 3 of Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is published online as a free PDF but will also be rolled out as Amazon Print on Demand and will be available on iTunes, iPad, Kindle and other e-publishing outlets.