A startling milestone on the darkly lit road once traveled by the likes of Bosch, Brueghel, Lovecraft, Poe and Kafka. Giger's remarkable book of the dead gives us some of the most powerful images ever an artist drew from the well of the imagination.
Kazuki Takamatsu was born in Sendai, Miyagi in 1978. Influenced by media and subculture growing up, he attended the Department of Oil Painting at Tohoku University of Art & Design and graduated in 2001. Takamatsu’s haunting black and white imagery explores narratives of death and society, through a unique depth-mapping technique that he developed, a style of illustration inspired by Japanese girl’s comics.
Takamatsu currently lives and works in Sendai, which was devastated by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami back in 2011. The event can still be felt in Takamatsu’s work which mixes memories of sorrow with a deep sense of hope in a spiral of emotions.
Being in Japan, he lives in a world with a shared reverence for traditional religion and pop-up culture icons like Hatsune Miku, or his city’s mascot, “Sento-kun”. He combines these contradicting ideas of idol worship into handpainted portraits of “Cyber Idols” that look three dimensional.
By contrasting the doll-like innocence of his translucent white figures with the stark blackness of their surroundings, his paintings express a subliminal violence softened by the ghostliness of their protagonists. His unique technique seems to be the result of a computerized depth map program but in reality he uses traditional mediums such as gouache, acrylic, gesso, giclee on tarpaulin and drawing combined with computer graphics. The paint is applied in different shades of grey and white layers on jet-black tarpaulin, creating the illusion of a 3D image or hologram.
Between surrealism and manga, Takamatsu’s work takes us to the 5th dimension.
He is represented by Corey Helford Gallery, Gallery Tomura, Tokyo, Galerie LeRoyer, Montreal, and Opera Gallery, Paris.
Tristan Perich is a contemporary composer and sound artist from New York City who focuses on electronic one bit sound.
Tristan Perich's work is inspired by the aesthetic simplicity of math, physics and code.
Perich composed a series of compositions as well as sound art installations with 1 bit electronics, which Perich describes as being music that never has more than one bit of information being played at any given time. In Denmark he was an artist in residence, where he built a series of sculptures called Interval Studies consisting of large amounts of small speakers all sending out their own frequency. The blending of all of these independent frequencies caused a white noise, or other forms of colored noise. Other works by him include Machine Drawings and 1-bit Video.
MIND THE MACHINE
"This short video documentary, Tristan Perich: Mind the Machine, by Russell Oliver, explores artist and composer Perich’s processes and thoughts on automation, sound, systems, and art. As Perich describes it, he’s interested in “where the physical world around us meets the abstract world of computation and electronics.” Perich speaks throughout, describing his approach to his work, and the video includes a studio tour - his studio being as much an electronics tinkering zone as it is a musician’s home recording space. He’s at work, for example, on a variation on the microtonal wall that consisted of 1,500 small speakers, and the studio is filled with clear plastic boxes to help him manage all his parts. He connects his own minimalist - “bare bones,” in his words - approach to that of his father, the artist Anton Perich. Like his father, Perich has explored an automated drawing machine, images of which open the film. There’s some especially glorious material toward the end in which a chorus of exposed speaker cones accompany pianist Vicky Chow in a live performance."
1,500 speakers, each playing a single microtonal frequency, collectively spanning 4 octaves, tuned individually to create an intricately varied continuum of pitch, rendering this twenty-five-foot wall a spectrum of sound.
“Each listener's exploration of that aural space shapes what they hear, from the totality of white noise (from a distance), to the single frequency of each speaker (up close).” This near-endless variation “opens the scope of the piece to the entire universe, since only from an infinite distance would we be equidistant to each speaker, though in that case they would also have zero volume, and we would be very far from home.”
Tristan Perich
Machine Drawings
The Machine Drawings - pen on paper or walldrawings executed by a custom-built machine - use randomness and order as raw materials within a composition.
I see randomness and order as occupying opposite ends of a continuous spectrum, and I use them to dictate the immediate motion of the pen. Varying levels of randomness - the probability the pen will change direction - produces the difference between straight lines or dense frenetic motion. While the motors' movements are the result of code executed precisely by machine, the final drawings come from the motion of pen on surface, and are wedded to effects from the physical world: the ripple of the string connecting pen to motor, the gradual depletion of ink, the texture of the paper. It is this balance between code and physics that excites me most, since the drawings couldn't be made without the code, and code needs to be realized in the physical world in order to be more than a set of instructions.
Noise Patterns
Prototype
Noise Patterns digs into the primitive particles of digital 1-bit audio that has become Perich's signature sound. As with his previous circuit albums, Noise Patterns is not released as a CD or record. Noise Patterns comes as a minimalist matte-black circuit board with a headphone jack in the side. The 6-track album explores how digital noise can be shaped and stressed, from glittering static into the mesmerizing electronic thump of a nightclub. On a technical level, the sonic raw material in Noise Patterns is digital 1-bit noise: a probabilistic density of random oscillations that Perich sequences into rhythmic patterns and layers into textures, pulses, rumbles and beats.
Notes
Circuit board with headphone jack, packaged in a card tray, housed in a jewel case which includes a poster. The device plays back 32 minutes of low-fi 1-bit electronic music. The final track plays indefinitely until switched off, starting at the point given above. Album gives its length as ∞.
Matte-black circuit board with surface mount parts. FCC Part 15 compliance text and CE certification screen printed on rear.
Available from Physical Editions.
0.01s
0.01s, Perich's new companion to 1-Bit Symphony, is an impressive synthesis of art and computation in book form, giving a tangible mass to the code behinds its music. Digging even deeper into the basic operations of computation, 0.01s captures the inner workings of 1-Bit Symphony over the first hundredth of a second after it is switched on. In just 0.01 seconds, its processor executes 80,000 computational cycles, enough information to fill a 695-page book with austere tables of numbers and machine language, becoming a visual meditation on the internal mechanics of computation.
1-Bit Symphony
1-Bit Symphony is an electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip. Though housed in a CD jewel case, 1-Bit Symphony is not a recording in the traditional sense; it literally "performs" its music live when turned on. A complete electronic circuit - programmed by the artist and assembled by hand - plays the music through a headphone jack mounted into the case itself.
Notes
Device is a battery-powered circuit with on-switch, volume knob, and button to skip tracks, designed to play through a mounted 1/8" headphone jack and housed in a CD jewel case. Small variations are due to the hand crafting of this piece.
"Movement 5" plays indefinitely until the device is turned off, at the point in time listed above. Album gives its length as ∞.
Packaged with liner notes, which contain a drawing of the device and its coding.
Limited edition of 5000 numbered copies is now sold out.
1-Bit Music
1-Bit Music probes the foundations of digital sound. An electronic circuit is assembled inside a CD case with a headphone jack on the side. The device plays back 40 minutes of low-fi 1-bit electronic music, the lowest possible digital representation of audio.
Notes
An electronic circuit is assembled inside a CD case with a headphone jack on the side. The device plays back 40 minutes of low-fi 1-bit electronic music.
Limited to 1000 copies with numbered insert.
The Cantaloupe Music release of 1-Bit Music and the artist edition are no longer available.
Michael Philip Manheim has been a professional photographer since 1969. A chance encounter with photography, at the age of 13, locked him into that life-long pursuit.
Intrigued with themes of change and transformation, Manheim developed a signature style of layering whole phrases of movement onto a single frame in the camera.
His early work is journalistic in nature. Marked by this reflexively intuitive approach to photography, Manheim's images evolved into the lyrical and evocative fine art photographs of his later work.
Manheim is widely recognized for his experimental and innovative multiple exposure photographs, images that celebrate human emotion as a primal link that unifies all of humankind. To underscore this theme, he finds ways to encourage audience participation in his exhibits, and regularly shows his work domestically and internationally.
Michael Philip Manheim's photography has been exhibited throughout the United States and in Germany, Greece and Italy, in over 20 solo exhibitions and over 30 group shows. His work has been featured in magazines such as Zoom (U.S. and Italy), Photographers International (Taiwan), La Fotografia (Spain), Black and White Magazine (U.S.), and published in hundreds of other books and magazines as well as in blogs online.
Manheim's photographs are held in private and public collections including the Library of Congress, the International Photography Hall of Fame, the National Archives, the Danforth Museum of Art, and the Bates College Museum of Art.
Julian Cox, Founding Curator of Photography and Chief Administrative Curator of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, noted that Manheim's photographs "have passion and beauty, and clearly considerable skill has gone into their execution."
