dichtung-digital: Paris Connection

One is struck by the minimalist congruence of the visual and sonic in servovalve's audio/visual/interactive Shockwave work. The music is minimal and so are the visuals. The music is, as he says, "electronic, rhythmic, energic, atmospheric, horologic (clock connected), meta-lithurgic... subambient... neurodance" and the visuals, set in the black background, derive their energy not at all from ornament but from their motion with the music and their programming-controlled transformations and movement.

servovalve also does performances with/of his work. So part of the energy of his work relates to the involvement of it in performance. He is one of very few musician-artist-programmers working seriously to the Web and also to live performance. And CD-ROMs. He has six CDs listed on his site. He also has an extensive MP3 download page.

servovalve does not describe himself as a programmer, but looking at his work and listening to the interesting synchronizations of the sound and the visuals, you see that his 'imaging Lingo', ie, programming to change bitmaps on the screen, is actually very good, and so are his skills at synchronizing the necessarily separate audio and visuals. He says

I'm not really a programmer... perhaps I'm becoming one... progressively...I've studied graphic art / visual communication. Mixed with the influence of music....the curiosity of combining both disciplines brings me to programming...It was not easy in the beginning... I'm not scientific minded...I started with Director using it as an animator (horizontal score). and step by step, with help / exchange from people like JL.Lamarque, O. Koechlin, and A. Schmitt, things became clear...it opened a large/infinite field of exploration to me. My scores are verticalizing progressively.

"My scores are verticalizing progressively"...a very interesting remark. The primary paradigm in Director and Flash is that of the "movie", which consists of a Score that consists of frames, like a movie, but each frame has channels, like an audio composition. People who can't program make Scores that are quite long, like a movie. Lingo programmers tend to make 1-frame movies and the motion and animation is controlled with programming. They subordinate the paradigm of the movie to the paradigm of the flowchart, which is primarily vertical, rather than horizontal. The Score becomes shorter and deeper.

servovalve, contrary to his own humble assessment, programs very well and, what is more, understands the use and importance of original code in his art and is not afraid of learning about it, finds it interesting to learn about. You can see this in his work, if you are familiar with other Shockwave work in which the code is somewhat similar but the meaning of the motion and the graphics is minimal compared with servovalve's intelligent, significant measures. Others doing related work often make noise and move stuff around and let it be interactive and see what happens. servovalve, on the other hand, pares it down to the bone, to only significant motion and sound.

Consider, for instance, a piece from his CD n-gone called "ligne de ville". This is one of my favorite pieces by him. Turn out the lights, go fullscreen on this one, and turn up the sound. The sound consists of a background loop and, when the graphics change, one of several different pure notes plays. It's rather a cosmic piece, somewhat night-skyish suggestive of the architecture of the heavens...or the bones of our own designs.