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Themesicon: navigation pathSound and Imageicon: navigation pathSound & Vision
 
Oval Process Public Beta (Popp, Markus), 2000Williams Mix (Cage, John), 1952
 
 
 

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music visually.

These three examples show the importance of artistic and technical teamwork. Competencies are mixed in these teams, without a classical rolesplit between image and sound or composition and performance. They create work whose changing format adapts to the different institutional and economic contexts of music and art. Technical and artistic innovation are interdependent here. Two other examples show how far the boundaries of existing techniques and formats are exceeded here.

As a member of the Oval group, Markus Popp produced electronic music to which his colleagues contributed visuals. That was in the mid 1990. Now Popp is Oval (see text by Popp). Since 2000, with «Oval Process» he has been introducing a type of artistic production that stands somewhere between all the genres: «Oval Process» consists of software, an interactive installation based on it and a music CD that has sold successfully under the same title. But it would be wrong to see this just as a clever three-fold marketing strategy. Popp explains that by publishing this authorial environment he wants to make himself

 

superfluous, as anyone can now make his or her own «user-centric» music using the software. But nevertheless, «Oval Process» software is not a new tool, but just a demonstration of his own working method, which refuses to use the all-too-simple aesthetic prefabricated in the music tools, and insists on laborious manual digital work. [30] In many respects this is reminiscent of John Cage's laborious creation of the «Williams Mix» audiotape montage by hand half a century before, and also of the ideal of music without musicians, generating itself, so to speak, from the application of random programs. So Popp's «Oval Process» software provides an analogy with the graphic scores and like Cage, this detour makes him the artist who is shown in exhibitions and museums. But Popp's intentions remain strictly musical: listeners become users, and they are to be shown the conditions under which electronic music is produced and the crucial influence that programs have on aesthetic output.

Netochka Nezvanova goes a step further. She is a fictitious person named after a character in one of Dostoevsky's novels; some people also call her an «entity.» She appears only via the Internet, were she

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