Gordon Monro - Images

This page contains an overview of my work in images and animation.

There is a separate list of pieces, with program notes and so on for each piece.

Artistic work

My artistic work in images was sporadic for a long time, though recently I have been focusing on work combining sound and image.

My early contributions to the watt events were of fractal images, computed ahead of time (Seven Studies in Space and Time), or generated in real time during the performance (Strange Attractors). After that I concentrated on sound and music, though there is one piece (Mandala 1086) derived from an image.

Around 1995 I became involved in a scientific project representing sounds as images. Later, as a spin-off I made my first attempt at an abstract video (Rainbow Snake Dry River). At that time I didn't really have access to the hardware or software needed to do this kind of work. Shortly after this I attended a National Summer School on Science and Art, run by the Australian Network for Art and Technology, which had a substantial focus on visual work. This had no immediate effect on my practice, but it is bearing fruit now.

In 2003 my studies at the Sydney Conservatorium gave me the impetus to return to work with images, resulting in the abstract video Red Grains. This in turn encouraged me to equip myself for further work in this area. At the end of 2004 I made another abstract video, Dissonant Particles, and in 2005 I developed a sound-and-image installation, Evochord. I have also made a laptop performance piece with a live video projection, Starfish; I am planning more work with sound and image.

It is clear to me that working with sound and images together is very different from working with sound alone. Even if most of the information is in the sound, our perceptions give us the illusion that the images are more important. This simply has to be accepted.

I am very interested in works where the sounds and the images are derived from a single process. To some extent my work falls in the catefory "visual music", though I don't quite think of it like that. Two organisations devoted to visual music: Center for Visual Music and iotaCenter.

Scientific work

Around 1995 I created some images of sounds using the technique of "lagged embedding" from chaos theory.

Some images

An article on this topic

The links above are to an archive of MikroPolyphonie. MikroPolyphonie was an Australian on-line music journal, which ran between 1996 and 2003 under the editorship of David Hirst. Also, together with Jeff Pressing, I wrote an article about this lagged embedding technique in the Computer Music Journal, vol. 22 no 2 (1998), pages 20-34.

This work was the basis of an article in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, the German edition of "Scientific American", March 2000, in the "Mathematische Unterhaltungen" (Mathematical Recreations) section.