Paris, a Rainy Street, in 1913 or 1966 is an audiovisual digital art object by Massimo Magee, designed to be read by the computer as both a visual still image and as a piece of audio, these being two readings of the same file. It was shaped across visual and audio dimensions functionally simultaneously, with a change in the visual also affecting the audio, and a change in the audio also affecting the visual. What the computer sees as one object with visual and audio aspects enmeshed within and between each other at once, human observers require to be translated into separate visual and audio readings. Here, these visual and audio readings have been layered into a movie file for ease of viewing and display. The piece includes processed image data, as well as virtual piano and virtual bass generated from the image data. The rainy Parisian street could be under the gaze of Claude Debussy or Cecil Taylor.
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