An Index of Metals by Romitelli/Pachini: An abstract-concrete multimedia essay on corruption

Stefano Lombardi Vallauri

IULM - Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione

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We can begin by making two specifications in terms of terminology:

1. various genres can be included in the transverse category of ‘ab­stract video’: ‘abstract cinema’ and ‘visual music’, abstract videoart, abstract cartoon cinema, abstract computer graphics, etc. Although they are quite distinct in both historical and technical terms, they all nonetheless share the essential quality of abstraction, as the term is normally used for the early 20th century abstract movements in painting and applied here to the moving image;
2. just as Nicholas Cook speaks of ‘musical multimedia’ for multime­dia “in which music plays a constitutive role” (Cook 1998, p. VI), so one can define ‘musical videoart’ a type of videoart “in which the music plays a primary role and takes on a crucial importance. Most videoart has music, but can still not properly be called musical vi­deoart (although the boundary between the two types is by no means clearly marked)” (Lombardi Vallauri 2009, p. 144).

In the intersection of the two categories of abstract video and musical vi­deoart we find a work like An Index of Metals in which the music ranks at least equal with the video component, and narration and (more radically) representation, two typical and necessary features in traditional cinema, are almost completely absent. In fact the formal aspect of the video component of An Index of Metals, although stemming from concrete original shots (of a series of metallic states and conformations), is abstract in outcome: so es­sentially material-based, and subject to such a range of computer elaborations (exactly like an acoustic sound treated electronically), that it proves to be practically indecipherable in figurative terms.

Over the last few years there has been a strong trend in the contempo­rary arts (making this a singular case in the extensive field of multimedia production) towards combining music and abstract video. This is a transver­sal trend concerning both the milieu of academic production, showcased in festivals that count on institutional backing, and that of popular genres, whose practices, whether free or commercial, are more pervasive in society. Right from the outset, in all the most important projects combining music and video the latter component consciously emulated the peculiar abstract nature of music. Just as Kandinsky based his new conception of painting on music’s natural status (Kandinsky 1979, pp. 21-23), so all the early and most important essays in abstract cinema took music as their paradigm (Proven­zano 1992).[1] However, developments in recent years testify to some different motivations and practices. More than in the past, nowadays the appropriation of a ‘second’ medium, distinct from the artist’s technical spe­cialization, can also start from the music: increasingly it is composers, who may be expert and indeed professionals in sound organization, who decide also to exploit video, having recourse to expert help but also as authors in their own right.

An osmosis between the crafts of the composer and the video-maker was already made feasible by the equipment that characterised the pre-digital electronic era. In the sphere of music this underwent a particularly intense development from the 1940s onwards.

Thus the boundary delimiting electroacoustic music is not clearcut. While not actually coinciding with analogous practices – popular music, radio, re­cordings – it has the same technical equipment and procedures, and hence also vocabulary. The genres are juxtaposed, and so too are the protagonists; the competences that the electronic composer can call on mean that he often has more in common with radio or image technicians than with composers for orchestra (Delalande 2001, p. 395, my italics).

The experiments with sound which Pierre Schaeffer carried out as part of his work for radio were explicitly based on the technical and aesthetic paradigm of the cinema (Schaeffer 1941-1942). One only has to think, for example, of the composition of the formal dimension of duration, which in both spheres was effected by means of the material editing of tape fragments rather than using symbols, signs in an allographic regime, as in traditional notated music (Goodman [1968] 1976, pp. 99-107). Nonetheless the subsequent dissemina­tion of computer technology gave a further fundamental impulse to this reciprocal assimilation of techniques. The new possibility of numeric ‘tran­scoding’ (Manovich [2001] 2002, pp. 67-71) played a decisive role because any type of material data (audio, video or whatever) can be reduced to a sin­gle type of symbolic data (the binary code): “the media differ at the ‘cultural level’, while they converge at the ‘IT level’, where they are all represented equally and managed as numeric forms” (Lombardi Vallauri 2009, p. 154n). Above all, for the first time in history, a common codification enables the ‘direct’ transposition of one type of material data into another, together with all the conceivable reciprocal elaborations. Just as a composer can use an image as his construction material, so the video-maker can use a sound; si­milarly, the algorithms used in the softwares for the elaboration of the audio or video signal are analogous, for example when morphing between two tim­bres or two human faces (this is not to deny or diminish the essential importance of the various constraints imposed on the media and artistic ge­nres by their specific psycho-perceptive bias, with its biological basis and historical and cultural conditioning). The process of the ‘fraying’ (Verfran­sung) of the boundaries between the arts identified by Adorno has undergone a dramatic acceleration (Gennaro – Borio 2007, pp. 335-337), fostered by technological progress and by its socioeconomic effects (on ac­count of the ever greater accessibility of the means of production).

An Index of Metals participates quite consciously in the historical and aesthetic scenario we have described, as its author makes clear: “C'est le projet tout à fait original de penser conjointement le son et la lumière, la musique et la vidéo, d'utiliser timbres et images comme éléments d'un même continuum soumis aux mêmes transformations informatiques” (Romitelli 2003). In my analysis I shall show how this important work of Italian musical videoart (that has already received at least fifty performances in international venues) achieves that particular type of audiovisual integration which arises out of the encounter between music and abstract digital video (whereas it lies outside the scope of this article to investigate other, nonetheless significant, aspects, such as the separate autonomous components, both video and musical, or their re­lationship with the verbal text).

[1] While in view of its status as a social practice, non-abstract videoart, although often intrinsically bound up with music (Gennaro – Borio 2007, pp. 349-350), occupies predominantly the field of the visual arts.