Sing Choirs of Engels

Above the forlorn fields of toil and oppression, a red dawn. Sing Choirs of Engels 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. The piece was shaped across visual and audio domains 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 file with both visual and audio aspects enmeshed within and between each other at once, human observers require to be translated into separate audio and image readings. Here, these two readings have been layered into a movie file for ease of viewing. The piece includes processed image data, live clarinet playing by Massimo Magee reacting to the image data, and virtual piano and virtual bass generated from the live clarinet. It was all created at Magee's studio in London, UK.