Transformative Reflections

nikolaj hess

This project investigates how Transformative Reflections can be developed as a range of methods and processes and how it can be used to create music based on and inspired by paintings. The project has worked with developing a method for translating from painting to composition and improvisation, and making inspiration from another artistic domain tangible. It also seeks to get closer to the artistic material and inspiration that to me seems to lie before the art expresses itself as a work, with an idea of what could be called a pre-art. Methodologically the project explores through four different method categories and an artwork dialogue perspective, both how to get closer to the intrinsic material and values in the reflected work, and to how the extrinsic expressions might translate to meaningful artworks in another domain, in this case music. Furthermore, it investigates the potential of new artistic hybrid art experiences based on the findings and examines the processes and considerations of these. The artistic purpose is through transformative reflections of painting to new works in improvisational and compositional contemporary music (jazz), to create a multidimensional, multisensory art experience space, where the individual work can be experienced both independently and in close communication with a work from another artistic domain.

From SMK music installation in front of The Red Studio

P7 APPENDICES

On this page, I have placed elements from my creative process as extra documentation and perspectives to my process that can give an added experience and insight into Transformative Reflections.

Music context, inspiration, and information.

It has been part of the process to attempt to clean my sound palette and, at the same time, search for a broader and deeper vantage point, and aim to have many colors at hand, including new contrasts to my usual aesthetics. I have sought to open up for other/new sounds and ideas from music and searched for music that could possibly also inspire and inform musical landscapes, forms, textures, and methods that are relevant for the Transformative Reflections. This pdf is a listening list of music context for information and inspiration:

List of selected audio sketches

List of audio sketches from the improvisation and composition processes, the methodology in action processes, and the listening, reflection, and selecting process:

MoMA Talk notes.

My notes for the concert and artist talk at MoMA:

Colors and notes connections.

A synaesthetic nature of this project could be said to be inherent by the nature of the project with two communicating senses of seeing and hearing. The focus I have had on a synaesthetic perspective through my process has mainly been the various colors to notes connections I have worked with. Hereunder, I include charts with different perceptions of relationships between colors and notes, including my own perception, ayurvedic connections, and transposition of frequencies by 40 octaves from sound to color.

Introduction - Method - Music and media - Reflections - Context - Events - Appendices - References