Cinematheque of Toulouse

Kenji Kojima, Techno Synesthesia: Withering Tulips Three Scales
7min 54 | United States

Feel full, find the original meaning of aesthetics/aesthesia that concern all the senses in this pleasure then the beautiful - today art, is the invitation of Synesthesia and that of Kenji Kojima who composes his Techno Synesthesia to from the visual data, by the computer algorithm. This is because the computer turns all sensory data into binary.
However, the poet of the synaesthesia exalted the meeting of the so-called letter and the smell and the color: thus reciting to oneself the emblematic Flowers of Evil IV: "Correspondances", "Nature is a temple where living pillars / [...] As long echoes which by far are merged / In a dark and profound unity / Vast like the night and as the clarity / The perfumes, the colors and the sounds answer each other. "

Or the most erotic Baudelairian Exotic fragrance "When, with both eyes closed, in a warm autumn evening / I breathe the smell of your warm breast / I see unfolding happy shores / Dazzle the fires of a sun monotone. "
Hypallage is triumphant in this contamination of the sensations of men to the elements that provoke them. Without resorting more to his library, to hear also Vowels Rimbaldien which makes vibrate these letters, each one in the color which it discovers to them.
In a leap by computer technology, this approach explains its relationship in "Techno Synesthesia" of particular flowers: the tulips and other sheet-images-sounds of the artist are devoted to the seasons, architecture or urban landscapes of MoMA New York streets with joggers.
Very far from the transhumanist propositions, the project merges what the human feels, his desire for beauty through an algorithmic composition of music. The colors of the flowers of a massif so provided that it shins closed tulips, open even open or faded, become notes of a musical score. The artist has created his own software RGB MusicLab to convert an image into music

by the computer algorithm gold, knowing how many are the data of these images to recognize, he has, in his constant research, developed a second filtering software to which he gave the name of the light in Italian, Luce because he opted for brightness as a criterion. Luce works with a live camera and a video file in RGB, to compare the light and shadow of the 84 grids attached to the video image from which it retains nuances what the program transforms into musical notes. Luce would also hear as a reminder of Scriabin's annotation on the score of his symphony Prometheus in 1910.
The work of Kenji Kojima transposes the invisible sound into visible heard ... both taken in the time of his creation in three movements.
The massif of tulips, corollas emerging above the long green leaves, varies from tea rose to powder pink, from dark purple to bright fuchsia. The approach is haptic, the petals are "touched" by the look drawn into the movement and the music ... the pianoforte, marked or more so, scans the framed binary propositions, popping there on this or that flower on a background of sounds of nature like the cries of birds. The digital image, the 0/1, is explained with the position of the notes in squares of thin white lines. A flow chart of broken lines is drawn, multiplies, rhizomic; it zigzags, spreads out before being framed in a rectangular parallelepiped, a filiform and moving sculpture on itself before spinning the flowers liberated from this now underlying numbering. The score to play distinguishes three designated moments and three rhythmic variations: Withering Tulips Three Scales / Withering Tulips Three Ranges / Scales: Mystic Agreement / Scale of All Inters / Range of Twelve Tones.

Such appellations bring together the historical times of sacred music with serial music, which prefers to display their project taken in the musical material, to be retained in the experimental sphere. Nam June Paik, who came from distant Korea to Europe for a thesis on Cage, regularly attended Stockhausen's electronic music studios. He often called televisions his installations "light pianos" as a soundbox as pictures, and explained compose his video as partitions. As for the precursor Nicolas Schöffer, he understands how the - new science - cybernetics would change the lives of humans and he sees the potential for art and his metal sculptures with colored filters, lights vibrate as a first to the concrete music of the 1950s, when he integrates the machine into his work.
Techno Synesthesia: Withering Tulips Three Sales thinks of its creation in a squared binary alliance as we say squared formula, since it implies the 0/1 and unites the senses of sight and hearing even such a union causes an invasion sensory of the body, the happiness of the forgetful senses of the machine-yet underlying it, and if it was there, the key to the man-machine relationship.

The artist explains how his software works "The RGB MusicLab software converts the RGB color value (red, green, and blue) of a still image into color-coded music (atonality). The program reads the RGB value of the pixels. A pixel makes a three-note harmony of the RGB value, and the length of the note is determined by the brightness of the pixel. The RGB value 120 or 121 is the middle C, and the RGB value 122 or 123 is added half a step from the range that is C #, and so on. Pure black which is R = 0, G = 0, B = 0 is not a sound.
RGB MusicLab converts an image into music using the computer algorithm. The program reads the RGB color data from 84 divided grids of a video [...] image and chooses the first three or four differences of the value one second before (it can control the sequence of intervals). Then the program converts the color values ​​into musical notes that are the same methods as RGB MusicLab.

Simone Dompeyre