Magnetic Poets are a performance group that
utilize the tools of movie production to improvise live audiovisual events.
A film school professor begins teaching a class of
new students by describing the idea of "montage";
the juxtaposition of two different images in time to
suggest a story. For example; if you were to see film
of an ambulance,
followed by a shot of a person running, you would assume they were connected
by the same event.
It can be much the same with picture and sound.
If you see the image of a person running and the sound of an ambulance,
it suggests much the same story.
For the Magnetic Poets, music and sound are
completed by imagery. Visuals take on an entirely different meaning with
the montage of sound. Filmmakers have created this way from the beginning.
The challenge to the Magnetic Poets was simply
how to allow the film making process to happen spontaneously, improvised
like jazz, so that the "movie" was an expression of the moment
in which it was created.
Scott
Dewar and Christopher Hedge were friends from college. Scott was
an amateur photographer and Christopher was studying
production in a planetarium. They formed an art group that would create
audiovisual "shorts" that would run before the regular space
program in the planetarium. They had 360º panoramas, the star projector,
lasers, and an eight channel sound system.
Christopher founded The Magic Shop recording studio
and began a full time career as a soundtrack composer. He met Julian
Smedley, also a full time composer, and began a fifteen year composing
and working relationship. Julian was involved in creating music and sound-design
for museum installations that used environmental sound as a part of the
exhibit.
The three began doing productions
for European art festivals, inspired by San Francisco visual artist
Nancy Lytle. Her technique involved large outdoor
projections on buildings, transforming whole spaces
with art and sound.
Originally, they set out to see if visuals
could be "performed", generated live with cameras, projectors,
lasers, somehow keeping the same flexibility that musicians have with
their instruments. The promise of virtual reality and nonlinear technology
suggested to them that instant choices could be made with both video
and sound. They began long careers of collecting original sound and images
from around the world to use as a new kind of instrument.
Today, the Magnetic Poets are performing for
large events as well as small art and club shows. They are getting closer
to the kind of technology that will enable their original goal of live
movie making.
Technology
The Poets technology allows them to bring movie production tools to the stage.
Everything you would find in a music recording studio or a video edit suite
has been customized into a nonlinear, digital environment.
Musicians can express themselves by simply
improvising on an instrument. So, how can images respond like a violin?
Film composers assemble their ideas like architecture. How can you make
a whole orchestra of ideas turn on a dime? Actually, it will take artists
like the Magnetic Poets and many others, a long time to reach that kind
of creative freedom. When the Poets began, they were using slide projectors
and tape decks.
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