Stroboscopic rhythm as chromaesthesia in Curgenven's Agenesis

Robert Curgenven has been developing his piece Agenesis since 2018 with concerts across Europe. Each performance saturates the performance space with stroboscopic visuals and sub-bass frequencies produced by dub plates, oscillators, and mixer feedback. The goal is to spontaneously generate coloured patterns in the audience’s perceptual field. This paper will situate Agenesis in the context of artistic experiments with stroboscopic epiphenomena.

Synaesthesia is the involuntary perception of one sensory modality following stimulus in another. The special case of chromaesthesia, the merging of acoustic and visual sensations, has been proposed in theoretical formulations (the Pythagorean application of musical harmony to colour values), created by musical devices (the “colour organs” of Alexander Rimington), and influenced compositional practice (the “colour music” of Scriabin). The continued search for pseudo-synaesthetic affects reflects our continued fascination with multimodal sensory phenomena.

Stroboscopic effects were explored in the counterculture era through concert visuals, Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine, and other experiments. Of special interest are the structural films “Arnulf Rainer” (Peter Kubelka, 1960) and The Flicker (Tony Conrad, 1966), which focused attention not on filmic content, but on the optical carrier. The rudimentary audio that accompanied the black and white frames (white noise and an oscillator tone, respectively) reinforced rhythm as the primary compositional device. The film frame itself was subsequently breached by works such as Light Music (Lis Rhodes, 1975), Nethergate (Bruce McClure, 2006), and “ON / OFF” (Bas van Koolwijk, 2017). These pieces use multiple image sources, freeing light from the screen while releasing the audience from their fixed position in a perspectival geometry. Such expanded cinema invites the audience member to be a productive element in the ongoing multimodal field, part of a collective experience that enhances the possibilities of chromaesthesia.

Agenesis continues the practice of producing maximal experiences from minimal technologies by leveraging multimodal phenomenological affects. By situating Curgenven’s work in a rich heritage, this paper will encourage further experiments.

Presentation

This paper will be presented at Music and Sonic Art, University of Manchester, 28-29 October 2023.