It all started with a sound.
On a cold and dark Monday evening in January, Digital Design students from the Department of Art and Design huddled in Studio 27, where the Department of Music's Free Improvisation Ensemble (also known as X42 ) gathered for their weekly rehearsal.
Focusing on timbre-based improvisation using musical instruments, electronic instruments and found objects, X42 creates music using group improvisational techniques organized through the cultivation of individual and collective ideas and experiments.
As a component of the Design 496 course led by instructor Gabe Wong, Digital Design students - whose course work focuses on manipulating, designing and criticizing the role of the image in complex communication using electronic media - were invited to listen to that early January performance as an element of an experiment: to see how art influences art.
"The Digital Design students listened to X42's performance and we explained a bit about what we do," said Mark Hannesson , assistant professor (composition) and co-director of X42. "From that experience, the Design students created original art inspired by the music, which was then translated into a series of digitally manipulated posters."
The posters were kept a secret from members of X42, who only saw them for the first time when the images were revealed during an improvisation concert titled Noise + Visuals.
"I arranged for a concert where the posters were projected one at a time and the members of X42, who had never seem them before, improvised on the images," said Hannesson.
The resulting display was a digital experimental success: the audience, seated in the dark, was able to see what X42's music looked like through the eyes and hands of talented Design students, while simultaneously listening to the sonic response: a back and forth between visual and audio to create a layered audience experience proving the theorem art undeniably influences art.
"Collaborating with Art and Design has been a great experience," explained Hannesson. "It was the first time that I really felt like we were all part of the Fine Arts Building and community."
One in a series of recent collaborative projects popping up in the Fine Arts Building - including a monthly pub night run by the Graduate Music Students' Association which invites artists of all disciplines to riff on a different artistic theme each month, as well as a recent faculty collaboration featuring visual works by Art and Design assistant professor Maria Whiteman and sound installations by assistant professor (composition) Scott Smallwood - the Noise + Visuals concert is one more example of the inherent need and want for collaboration among the fine arts.
"It proves there is immense interest for these sorts of projects," continued Hannesson. "It shows that by getting together we can create an experience for our students, ourselves and our audience that is unique, exploratory and important to the artistic process and artistic understanding."
Listen to the original pieces played to inspire the posters.