Happy mid-February, everyone. Every new year, I tell myself that sometime in the middle of Feb I’ll be jolted into realizing that nearly 2 months of the year have already passed, and I’ll have no idea where the time has gone. Every year I combat this by keeping myself as busy and productive as possible in January. And then mid-Feb arrives and the jolt arrives… I’m beginning to realize that this sudden ‘time-awareness’ is due to the fact that I’ve kept myself too busy to notice the time passing by.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because the one thing that I haven’t kept up on is this AVA Spotlight article, which is supposed to published once a month. With all this ‘busy work’ I’ve been doing, I’ve neglected the more fulfilling pastime of writing this newsletter. Hence, this entry has become a mega-entry, fair warning. I don’t expect you to read it all in one sitting. Later on I might split this into two posts, but for now… Audiovisual Art mega-thread incoming.
Parsa Mostaghim
I’m starting with an artist who can do it all: Parsa Mostaghim, from Tehran, Iran. He creates partially fantastical, somewhat realistic 3D scenes, in a kind of wobbly, grotesque yet appealing visual style, all backed by his own music. Parsa has a multi-step process when creating his work: he first sculpts the scene in VR, using his Metaquest 2 headset. He then imports the 3D files into Blender, where he fine-tunes the composition, adds lighting, and creates the animation. Finally, he fires up his synthesizers and composes the music for the piece.
This work is called Out of Gas and Desperate for Love, and the more I look at it, the more I love it. The perspectives are strangely collapsed but still three-dimensional; I keep seeing new details like windshield washer fluid in mid-stream, the Nike swoosh on a squished green shoe of one of the characters in the piece, and of course the cute little dog nodding its head over a pink bone...
All the while, this square wave synth melody is bouncing along to the scene, with the sound of birds and passing cars completing the weirdness. The sound effects actually make the scene seem more real, as if your really looking at a couple and their dog stranded on the side of the road, trying to get out of their predicament. And speaking of synths, Parsa seems to have a setup that is the REAL DEAL — look at his still life painting of his studio:
If you haven’t checked out Parsa’s work, go have a look. His twitter handle is https://twitter.com/parsa_mostaghim. It’s always great to find an artist with a unique, consistent style, and Parsa’s audiovisual skills are an added bonus.
Saeko Ehara and Xiaolin
The next piece that I want to highlight comes courtesy of OpenLab, a platform ‘showcasing the best in innovative and alternative music and art’. They broadcast from our Hangar8289 Ibiza hub and internationally online at OpenLab.fm; they’ve been around since 2013, founded by the composer and DJ Robert Miles. OpenLab was conceived specifically to showcase the best in innovative yet accessible music and visual art, and so it’s natural that they are pioneers in the world of audiovisual art (and NFTs) as well.
I know and admire the work of Saeko Ehara, and so was happy to see her part of the recent OpenLab collaboration series New Mycelium Network.
The piece is linked above, and it’s best to just give the full artwork description here:
‘Sonata’ is a collaboration between digital artist Saeko Ehara and producer, DJ and instrumentalist Xiaolin. To create the extraordinary sound composition, Xiaolin used acid sound design, mirroring water bubbles and mostly analog synths, imitating natural textures with white noise. Everything is played by hand and she has layered real violin recordings on top. Ehara’s visuals are inspired by the ‘Monotropastrum humile’ plant — a plant with a unique ecology that is parasitic of fungi. Thriving in difficult conditions, it produces colour without chlorophyll and as such becomes a symbol of hope and survival.
Visuals: Saeko Ehara
Audio: Xiaolin
Title: Sonata
Date: 2022
Format: MP4
Dimensions: 1280 x 720 px
Duration: 1:13
Unique Edition 1/1
It’s difficult to pull off a good collaborative piece — I know this from experience. Sometimes one party is too overbearing, sometimes both are too passive, not wanting to step on each others’ toes; but the feeling that I get from this piece is that both artists felt comfortable enough with each other to give it their all. These artists weren’t just phoning it in. Creating a piece of music this layered (recording real violin) takes a lot of time, and the 3D visuals, with the various scenes, animation and lighting — this is truly a piece that elevates both artists’ contributions and takes them to a new level.
As an aside — I had to google Monotropastrum humile because, you know, ‘self-education’, and to save you the trouble, here is your new scientific knowledge of the day:
Monotropastrum humile is a species of myco-heterotrophic plant of the family Ericaceae, distributed throughout eastern Asia, from the Himalayas to the Islands of Japan. It lacks chlorophyll and is therefore unable to perform photosynthesis as most plants do; instead it gains sugars and nutrients from mycorrhizal fungi.
Raphaël Erba
I’ve seen the work of Raphaël Erba (twitter: @pipouz01) pop up every so often on my twitter feed, so I’ve known for some time that he’s an artist that I wanted to take a closer look at. I procrastinated, and missed his open edition on Manifold by just a day(!), and so, kicking myself, decided to write about his work in the newsletter, finally. First off — here is his Manifold OE:
As I mentioned above the mint period has passed, but you can still find some on secondary of course. Raphaël Erba is a dad (like me) with a little girl (like me) who “inspires me every day…” (also like me). He even composes his own music! But that’s where the similarities between us end, because he’s French, he’s a poet, and a ridiculously talented 3D animator, all of which are qualities/skills that I lack. This piece is clearly inspired by his daughter, and if you go to his various profiles on Foundation and SuperRare you’ll see more works on the subject; I love them all and I can completely relate to them (especially the one of his girl riding her bike for the first time).
I took a dive into Raphaël’s portfolio and dug out a few gems; there is an acrobatic ninja theme that runs through his works, which I love very much, but the one that stood out to me is more quiet and instrospective. I imagine it to be like a self-portrait, with his ninja persona creating art, called The Release. The music sets the tone, along with the artwork description:
Every blank page promises the release of new ideas, fragile and light as paper… Open the cages of your minds and let them fly away.
Another piece (a series, really) is Raphaël’s Mind Flow series — the animation is spotless, with a flow that reminds me of Sebastian Pfeifer (Everfresh), and crisp music production to match. His loops are short but seamless, and you can zone out to them, which is probably part of their point — finding a meditative balance.
Ykha Amelz x Discokid909
“There are paintings in our mind Creatures that we can’t control And it’s our dream to paint them That’s the only thing we want to do When they’re out on display People look at them like they’re in a dream It’s as if they’re not humans but just some kind of creatures that we made Painting dreams all night long”
For my final entry this month, I am bringing you to the dancefloor. My favorite duo from Indonesia created a 3-part Audiovisual Odyssey for Living System, a Tezos Exhbition at S.E.A. Focus 2023, the anchor event of Singapore Art Week last month. You can find out more about the artist duo at the link above, as there’s a great interview with the two of them, but in a nutshell — they are two of the most high profile artists in Jakarta, working with brands in Web2 including Vans, Coach, and Netflix, and at the same time selling out NFT collections like project by Ykha that was published by artist Brian Brinkman on Nifty Gateway. I asked them separately to be part of ONBD’s Sound and Vision exhibition objkt.com last year, not knowing at the time that they worked as a duo (and are married, actually), and they both accepted, graciously!
Anyway, on to the artworks. Entitled ‘One Frequency’, the piece is broken up into three parts, each one minted separately on Tezos. The music could easily be spliced back together into one longer track — in fact I’d love to have a version like this — but when blended with the visuals, they really make sense as three separate movements, which I’ll attempt to describe below:
Part 1: The trio of works begins with Peputo’s Intro. A warm, synthy chord progression fades in and we see Ykha’s signature pink pear-shaped character rotating to the music, holding a glowing white puffball that looks like it’s ‘singing’ the higher up melody that comes in…
Part 2: A Distant Voice, the same chords repeat but are played by different instruments and DiscoKid makes them more rhythmic, while adding vocals that echo unintelligible lyrics. The visuals are more psychedelic, with some of the ‘stage lights’ still visible but now the background has become multicolored universe, with shooting stars that leave rainbow trails behind them. The main character in this piece is a floating figure underneath a white blanket, wearing the same socks as the previous pink character…perhaps Ykhan has names for these characters, and perhaps I’ll ask her one of these days.
Part 3: is called D-909 Groove Arcade, and musically it sounds like a direct continuation of the previous track, but with some drums added in the background. Fairly quickly, DiscoKid drops the lowpass filter and the drums come in full force, along with one of the funkiest basslines I’ve heard in about a decade, and we’re watching a 3-headed, 6-armed, zebra striped creature grooving to my new favorite track.
The artists write that with these works, they want “to achieve an overall sense of wholeness in our visuals by creating a frequency through sounds. The use of positive melodies and visuals with tones that range from light to dark are meant to cradle the viewer to relax. An escape from the everyday and a celebration of now.”
That’s dancefloor ethos right there.
Ok, this article has gone on long enough. Maybe I should have split them into two entries after all. If you’ve read this far, thank you for sticking with it and please stay tuned for more AudioVisual art spotlights (of a more manageable length) in the coming months!
