Cezanne App: Proposal for ‘Soundscapes’
Avenue-displace
Proposal
Working with Herd, an electronic music producer, I am developing an educational App, constructing interactive visual compositions that react to audio signals based on the National Gallery painting Avenue at Chantilly by Paul Cezanne. Devising methods of transforming visual data from a photographic image of the painting into sound, players can attempt to retrace steps to form the painting; reanimating the painting based on Herd’s response whilst embracing chance to re-form the image in the process of playing. Herd released his ‘Tangents’ series, with support from Mary Anne Hobbs on BBC Radio One, on pioneering 1990’s electronic band The Future Sound of London’s online label FSOLdigital.com.
"Every disease is a musical problem, and every cure is a musical solution." George Augustus Auden
This project explores my intrinsic interest in the working methods of Cezanne and significantly, whilst creating the App, Pathotones in 2014; a potential art therapy tool for Cancer patients (where the player can alter the visual ‘matter’ of an ultrasound scan through playing music), it pushed me to new insights in relationship to Cezanne. A common creative process unites Pathotones, and in turn Cézanne’s painting. For example, Cézanne worked using ‘patches’ of colour, with each patch relating precisely to all the others. Through the interaction of the colours, the harmony of the picture as a whole emerged. A non-harmonious intervention, such as placing the wrong colour in the wrong place could spell disaster! Pathotones was created using what are called ‘patches’ of code, where forming relationships between patch ‘families’ is essential for the game to function harmoniously and in turn for the player to be able to re-form the image. Indeed, Herd’s methods also correlate with the ‘interior music’ of Cezanne’s paintings – his sound expresses vivid atmosphere, and like a Cezanne, although samples (or patches) may appear random, is coherent, rendering a totalising sense of place despite fragmented parts. The music has a sense of process or change through time, continually shape-shifting rhythmically or timbrally into ever-new forms.
I see this work as a link between Inventing Impressionism and Soundscapes; Cezanne’s revolutionary work echoing into contemporary art and wider disciplines, such as science. Artists certainly profit from their meetings with science, but how does science benefit? According to former physicist turned writer David F. Peat, Cezanne may have pushed the 20th Century physicist David Bohm to new insights as he was looking for a ‘new order’ to physics, just in the way Cezanne was in painting.
The potential here is for experimental arts research feeding into education, science, and healthcare, by applying the innovations of Cezanne to new forms of contemporary art making. And in turn can the making of this game, unfolding his process, provide new insights into his working methods contributing to National Gallery research and Outreach programmes while simultaneously pushing Pathotones in new directions.
“Cezanne discovered methods and forms, which have revealed a vista of possibilities to the end of which no man can see; on the instrument that he invented thousands of artists yet unborn may play their own tunes.” Clive Bell