Art and Design Commons^™

Correspondences And Complementarity In Visual Music, Bill Alves

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

Visual music is an art form that implies intermodal connections between the senses but which has historically often failed to identify aesthetically satisfying correspondences. Artistic success does not automatically emerge in one medium when its elemental characteristics are mapped to those of an existing work from another medium. I offer examples from my own abstract animations with music, which draw upon John Whitney's concept of complementarity, a more intuitive correspondence at a higher level of aesthetic qualities, that of stasis and dynamism or tension and resolution.