Copyright by Leonardo de Cardoso 2010 The Report Committee for Leonardo de Cardoso Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report: Visual Music: an Ethnography of an Experimental Art in Los Angeles APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Supervisor: Veit Erlmann Sonia Seeman Visual Music: an Ethnography of an Experimental Art in Los Angeles by Leonardo de Cardoso, B.M. Report Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Music The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master’s of Music Master of Music The University of Texas at Austin May 2010 Dedication To my parents, Edmundo and Arminda. Acknowledgements My idea with this study was to write a narrative where voices other than mine could be put together, and where the resulting consonances and dissonances could somehow delineate the field I was trying to understand. In that sense, I want to thank all my ethnographic collaborators for being part of this research. Hopefully I have not misrepresented any of them, and my own interpretation of their practices will be understood as a valid and thought-provoking point of view. Other collaborators I would like thank include ethnomusicologists from the Group of Musical Studies at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, with whom I was associated from 2005 to 2008 and where I found a fruitful space to learn collaboratively about anthropology, musicology, and ethnomusicology. At the University of Texas at Austin I was also nurtured with stimulating ideas. Professors James Buhler, Caroline O’Meara, and Robin Moore assisted me in different ways during my studies. Professor Sonia Seeman was kind enough to read the whole draft and offer insightful suggestions. My special thanks to Professor Veit Erlmann for his support during all stages of my academic life in the U.S. With Professor Erlmann’s motivation I felt comfortable to delve into analytical approaches and research topics that are outside the mainstream musicological/ethnomusicological literature. My family has been another group of very important collaborators, always encouraging me in decisive moments. Thank you Edmundo, Arminda, Guile, Kim, Leo, Fi, Talita, Mari and Marco for investing in me. And thanks Sibbi for being part of my life. May 7, 2010. v Abstract Visual Music: an Ethnography of an Experimental Art in Los Angeles Leonardo de Cardoso, M.Music The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisor: Veit Erlmann This Report focuses on social networks surrounding visual music, a sub-field of audiovisual experimental art in which hearing and seeing intersect, often through the music-oriented manipulation of abstract imagery and audio-visual synchronization. The discussion evolves from my fieldwork in Los Angeles, where I interacted with artists, archivists, publishers, institutions, software developers, and scholars. Taking into account Howard Becker’s notion of art world, Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas of cultural and economic capitals, and Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, I try to understand how these groups have been trying to establish visual music-networks. Although elements of visual music have been present in various media and artistic trends (color organs, abstract films, VJing-DJing, etc.), the field’s history and premises are still little known, in part because the very term ‘visual music’ is a contested one. Due to its entertainment/cultural industries, Los Angeles is a place where multiple processes of high tech differentiation coexist; since the 1930s the city's technocultural environment (from film production to academic programs on computer animation) has lured artists interested in visual music. Not surprisingly, the city holds the only two institutions directly related to visual music in the country. I navigate through this field by considering some intersections between science, art, and technology. vi Table of Contents List of Figures.................................................................................................................. viii Chapter 1: Introduction........................................................................................................1 Chapter 2: Experimental Art, Science, and Technology: a Few Nodes............................ 19 Chapter 3: Abstraction, Music, and Visual Music............................................................ 48 Chapter 4: Mapping Los Angeles................................................................................... 120 Chapter 5: Visual Music in/from Los Angeles.................................................................158 Chapter 6: Actor-Network, Art World, and the Field of Cultural Production..................176 Conclusion...................................................................................................................... 197 Appendix A: About the Ethnographic Collaborators...................................................... 202 References....................................................................................................................... 209 Vita.................................................................................................................................. 217 vii List of Figures Figure 1: Human rhizome-fieldwork................................................................................ 14 Figure 2: George Stadnik, Trip the Light Fantastic.......................................................... 81 Figure 3: Bill Ham’s Light Show Equipment................................................................... 82 Figure 4: Scott Draves, Dreams in High Fidelity II........................................................ 100 Figure 5: Scott Pagano, Parks on Fire............................................................................ 102 Figure 6: Semiconductor, Black Rain............................................................................. 104 Figure 7: VJ-DJ performance at the Avalon, Los Angeles.............................................. 105 Figure 8: Soundspectrum, G-Force ‘Music in Motion’ (online advertising).................. 107 Figure 9: Three-dimensional diagram about visual music evaluation............................ 108 Figure 10: Automotive-rhizome, Los Angeles................................................................ 120 Figure 11: Geography of Cultural Production in Los Angeles....................................... 134 Figure 12: Geography of Cultural Events in Los Angeles.............................................. 135 Figure 13: Geographic Fieldwork-rhizome.................................................................... 136 Figure 14: Institutional Fieldwork-rhizome.................................................................... 152 Figure 15: Visual music performance at the Abstract Animation Workshop.................. 168 Figure 16: DJ Sharam at the Love Fest Los Angeles...................................................... 170 Figure 17: VJ Grant Davis ta the Love Fest Los Angeles............................................... 170 Figure 18: CineChamber at the University of California, San Diego............................. 174 viii Chapter 1: Introduction How do people listen to music? The question, when understood in its full potential (what does it take for music to sound?), has been appealing enough to attract musicologists and ethnomusicologists. These are scholars who venture into ‘webs of significance’ and who, after extensive periods of data collection and deep analysis (of how musical practices are constructed and shared, are finally able to enlighten their audience as to what that sound is (or was) about; they inform us how certain musical practices sound through the bodies of those involved, and how sounds and bodies resonate with (or despite) other practices. Let me ask something different: how do people see music, and how do they listen to images? What is the aesthetic justification for integrating sound with moving images, and how should these images look like? Should they be abstract, following the ideology of 19th century Western classical “absolute music,” where non-representation becomes synonymous of transcendence and artistic autonomy? Suppose that you have decided to create such visual music: how would you do it? Would you build your own audiovisual synthesizer and perform it in real time, program using computer language, use off-the- shelf software, draw or paint directly on film celluloid, or would you manipulate images on a television set using magnets? Where would you exhibit it? At a new media festival, fine art museum installation, electronic music party, movie theater, gallery, airport lounge, or at people’s homes? How would you acquire the knowledge to create it? Would you just buy whatever material you had selected to work with and learn to do it by experimenting with your 1 friends, would you try to enter in an institution that would give you access to costly machinery and experienced personnel, knock on your mentor’s door and ask for advice, learn by patiently assembling bits of information collected from Internet tutorials and email lists (these dazzling and ever-sprouting human-machine networks), or would you lock yourself in a room with ‘nothing’ but an idea, electric supply, and a box made of integrated circuits, silicon, metal, and plastic? After putting some thought on how much energy you would invest to create this visual music, would you take it as a day job, a night job, a hobby, or some kind of idée fixe that refuses to leave you alone? After that, how