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 images have become much more central to my work.

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 for a long time, 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 afterwards 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 (which has a long audio-visual tradition) gave me the impetus to return to work with images, resulting in the abstract video Red Grains. Since then I have made several sound-and-image works, always with a close relationship between the sound and the image. To some extent my work in this area falls in the catefory "visual music", though I don't quite think of it like that.

In 2008 I started a part-time PhD in the Faculty of Art and Design, Monash University, finding myself in a visual arts environment. This led me to Exiguous Cubes, my first work without any sonic component, though I have no intention of abandoning sound permanently.

It is clear to me that working with sound, working with sound-and-image, and working with images alone are three very different things. With the sound-and-image combination, even if most of the information is in the sound, our perceptions give us the illusion that the images are more important. Shutting off the sound, working with images alone, certainly reveals how much effect sound has.

Scientific work (old news now)

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.