s i l h o u e t t e


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Prototype#1-fotos:


History
In 1992, I was 24 years old and a student for experimental-film at the art-academy-hamburg (germany). In the stop-motion-class of professor Franz Wintzensen we (the students) started working on blank-film-material to get an idea of the relationsship between time while screening and length of the material. As a music-addicted I drove my attention to the sound-track on the film-material (it was 35mm-material with optical sound!) So I glued curtains on the film material even on the optical-sound-track, because I knew that the periodical structures of the curtains would generate steady tones, not noise. So it was. The film is called "gardine sing sing" ("curtain sing sing") and can be seen here.
("Johannes Przygodda" = "Pit Przygodda")
I have been on several media festivals in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands with it, it was on Arte-TV and it is part of the movie-compilation "Deutsche Experimentalfilme der 90er Jahre" by the Goethe-Institut. It is distributed by "Light-Cone", Paris, France.
For years and years I had this topic in the back of my mind and I wondered how to go on with it some day. In the meantime I had a practical course in the ponton-media-art-lab, hannover (with Benjamin Heidersberger and Salvatore Vanasco), which had a artistic motivation at that time. We were thinking about music and sound in 3-D-space. Some years later I was working at "Steinberg" (Cubase etc.) in the service department. There I had some contact to devellopers and programmers. All these years I talked about that topic with my filmmaker-friend Jan Peters and other musical and artistic collegues again and again. Until I suddely knew how to make it. It has to be a software, which transforms video-data in real time into audio-data! But I could not do it myself, because I am not a programmer. Some Programmer-friends of min etried to work on the project but they never had enough time and energy for it. Than after a while, I started trying something with Pure-Data - and - it worked!
After all that years I realized that it was not only my idea which was not ripe - when I started thinking on that idea the computers weren´t able yet to do such a job. At that time I had an ATARI ST 1040!
I´ve been at the Synthesizer-Fair "Superbooth 16" (Berlin) in 2016 with a first prototype-setup. I named it "videovox", ("video"="to see", "vox"="voice), but many people had the misunderstanding, that they thought it was a machine to generate pictures from sound, a VJ-machine. From a distance they didn´t get the point that it was just the other way round: pictures create sound. So I changed the name to "silhouette", what suits well the fact that the main-idea was to get into the shapes of audio-waveforms by performing with silhouettes, e.g. your hand.
Since then I have performances (with a concert-part and a discussion-part) with
s i l h o u e t t e to get more experience with it, how to use it and what is the effect on an audience. At the moment it seem not only to be a sound-synthesizer where you can get an inspiring approach to sounds but also a machine which shows it´s visual material on an screen.

I would like to finsh this text with a memory of Edwin Welte and his "Welte-Lichttonorgel" (1930), which is kind of a predecessor for s i l h o u e t t e.

- Pit Johannes Przygodda, august 2018 -

Public Presentations
2018 "Interim" and workshop for students at the Kunsthochschule, Kassel GER
2018 Küsterscheune, Betzendorf, GER
2017 Chavis-Kulturcafé, Hamburg, GER
2017 Invitation to Synthposium, Moscow, RU
2017 1st public presentation, "Kino im Sprengel". Hannover, GER
2016 Superbooth Synth-fair, Berlin, GER









The first public presentation of Silhouette (formerly: "Videovox") November 2016, "Kino im Sprengel", Hannover, Germany:
(best of)
Video-details:

0:09: Schablonen vor Lichtpult und Kamera
0:59: Klavier dazu
1:12: Movie-Datei
1:24: Bilddatei, Bildauswahlfenster animiert
1:33: Movie-Datei, Mosaik-Effekt
1:40: High Pass Filter
1:45: bewegte Schablonen vor Kamera, Movie-Datei Überblendungen, Mosaikeffekt animiert, Low Pass Filter animiert
2:00: Bilddateien, Auswahlfenster animiert
2:14: Bilddatei / Moviedatei Überblendungen, Mosaikeffekt
2:23: Hans Joachim Knusts Lego-Maschine #1 vor Kamera, Mosaikeffekte, Schablonen, Auswahlfenster animiert
3:11: Lego-Maschine #2, Mosaikeffekt, Movie-Datei Überblendung
3:23: Lego-Maschine #3, Mosaikeffek