Jack Ox in residence at C&CRS
An extract from the description of Jack's residency during the Summer of 2002 (taken from: Candy, L. and Edmonds, E., The COSTART Exhibition at C&C2002. in Creativity & Cognition 2002. Loughborough, UK, 2002. LUSAD Publications, p11-22.)
Jack Ox, an artist who is based in the USA and also works often in Europe, makes works in which music and images are closely related. Her primary goal is to create an intimate correspondence between visual and musical languages. She describes what she does as a form of "translation" of music into sets of visual languages. To achieve this, she has to determine structural parameters of the piece of music to be visualized, which take the form of operating principles and data sets that are encoded in MIDI files in 'The 21st Century Color Organ'. When a work that represents a transformation from music to a virtual world has been constructed, the viewer can move at will through the space and touch elements of the sculpture and hear the sound which originally produced it. In this art experience, the participant can move around in a three-dimensional visual space that is also a representation of a musical space. Although the viewer does not influence the state of the work, he or she chooses a viewpoint and moves around it in a very real and dynamic way. A critical part of the creative process over many years for Jack Ox has been her collaboration with composers and experts in digital technology. She has moved on from having a technological assistant to one of having a technological equal partner and co-author of her art. She also finds that such collaborations provide the triggers for significant creative advance. Jack took part in a COSTART residency in June 2002 when she worked with Mark Fell and Manu Uniyal to develop three-dimensional representations of a musical score.
Jack Ox, an artist who is based in the USA and also works often in Europe, makes works in which music and images are closely related. Her primary goal is to create an intimate correspondence between visual and musical languages. She describes what she does as a form of "translation" of music into sets of visual languages. To achieve this, she has to determine structural parameters of the piece of music to be visualized, which take the form of operating principles and data sets that are encoded in MIDI files in 'The 21st Century Color Organ'. When a work that represents a transformation from music to a virtual world has been constructed, the viewer can move at will through the space and touch elements of the sculpture and hear the sound which originally produced it. In this art experience, the participant can move around in a three-dimensional visual space that is also a representation of a musical space. Although the viewer does not influence the state of the work, he or she chooses a viewpoint and moves around it in a very real and dynamic way. A critical part of the creative process over many years for Jack Ox has been her collaboration with composers and experts in digital technology. She has moved on from having a technological assistant to one of having a technological equal partner and co-author of her art. She also finds that such collaborations provide the triggers for significant creative advance. Jack took part in a COSTART residency in June 2002 when she worked with Mark Fell and Manu Uniyal to develop three-dimensional representations of a musical score.
