The rest of this week I will be spending in Berlin at the other digital and electronic art festival, Transmediale 07. I’ve arrived last night, am staying in the incredibly cool East Berlin and will be networking and wallowing in what the event has to offer until Sunday. Hopefully a lot of events will be interesting as there’s no lack of interesting people around here.

I have just participated in a very interesting session about the very little known electronic artist Mary Ellen Bute. It’s a surprise how someone who has done such incredible work in the electronic arts gets so easily overlooked. During the session which basically served more or less as an introduction to the recently established Institute for Media Archeology, Sandra Neumann spoke about Mary Ellen Bute and has shown three animations made by Bute. And in one word, her work is impressive.

Unfortunately Bute’s work is not very easy to get by, so I just can’t give you a link and let you experience it by yourself. There are a few stills here and there on the net, but they are nowhere near as telling as these electronic and light animations are when they are in motion. Bute not only experimented with light and shadow, abstracting different utensils from beaters and egg cutters to ping pong balls, but also used oscilloscopes and cathode ray tubes to visualize sounds. Most special about Bute is that she did all this from 1930’s onwards.

Her animations are quite intense and even though she begun using various electronic equipment already in the 1930’s, her work is fast paced with many, many short cuts, very much late 1990’s music video kind of cuts. Which is a reason why one of the session presenters hinted that Bute used music to sooth down the motion of animations. Some of her work could be characterized as an animated version of Kandinsky. But what I would like to see is her visualization of part of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

It’s interesting how just in the last few years electronic artists like Bute are all of a sudden being rediscovered. I’ve been following digital and electronic arts for around ten years now and pretty much all the time almost all the works have been revolving around the latest technology and gadgets. Unfortunately this is not just the position held by the festival curators, but also by the researchers and writers who have 95% of the time nonchalantly ignored electronic and digital arts’ roots. So I was happy to see that, for instance, Eliane Rodigue resurfaced at last years Ars Electronica. I am sure contemporary artists could learn a lot from their roots.

Mladen

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Art, Germany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.