Eye-Music: Artist in Residence Thor McIntyre-Burnie Thor McIntyre-Burnie is the artist in residence for Eye-Music. His projects will be varied, challenging and exciting and are explained here.
Orchitecture Orchitecture is part of an ongoing project (est. 2004), led by artist Thor McIntyre-Burnie, working in collaboration with architect and author Ayssar Arida and the New London Orchestra. The premise behind Orchitecture is one very similar to the abstract painters of the 1920's. "I can draw an exploded diagram of a mechanical engine to understand how all the components work together, but how can I create one for an orchestra and still capture the emergent qualities of a piece of music, where the whole is much more than the sum of its parts? How can I make a representation of an orchestra that includes time & space and also subjective emotional experience?" Thor McIntyre-Burnie For painters in the 1920s, abstraction offered a solution. For installation artist Thor McIntyre-Burnie it is Orchitecture. In essence, the idea is that the orchestra is removed from the objective stance of the stage and exploded around the caveats of a building, yet despite the dislocation of its components, the symphony continues. Here the elements of time and space have been stretched, and the viewer walks through and amongst the symphony. The aim is to make these factors that are implicit in the perception of music explicit. So much so, that one has to physically navigate an architectural space in order to perceive, not only all the physical components of the orchestra, but also the musical score itself. The experience becomes a process of discovery, a journey and a series of encounters. These encounters are not just with a loudspeaker, nor simply visual or acoustic. They are with real people making live musical sound. These encounters may be awkwardly intimate, challenging, dull or thrilling.
A-tonal Time Twister: An interactive lift installation "..in the third movement of Schoenberg's Second string quartet, the music takes leave of its key of Fsharp minor and veers off into an atonal abyss. In that instant, the harmonic laws that governed European music for 500 years are declared null and void." The day music went mad, by Norman Lebrecht. What happens if we take a-tonality a step further and break the laws of music time and space? What if the composition and the concert is stretched over 100s of short 8-15 sec physical journeys of an elevator, each a separate experience, where the number of people or the movements of the passengers determine the number of musicians heard? We get this: a bite size portion of Orchitecture, folded into a medley of Schoenberg's Second String Quartet, Kandinsky's colour-tone theory and a game of Twister, served up in short sharp journeys in an art gallery elevator. Here the concept of Orchitecture is distilled into an elevator; the musicians and their rooms have been replaced by pressure sensitive coloured circles and corresponding pools of coloured light upon an elevator floor; the spatial navigation has become a game of Twister; musical time passes only via the lift's physical journey time and the score is thus staggered and played out through a series of lift journeys.
Music for the Eye to Do A series of workshops with a local deaf group. Their aim, to explore concepts raised by the exhibition Eye Music, Orchitecture and the very visual nature of music technology. The results of this process will contribute towards a short documentary film.
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