We Need Nothing to Collide from Mark Wheeler on Vimeo.

We Need Nothing to Collide is a music visualization synced up with Ableton and then projected with a 5000 lumen projector from a car onto the natural world.  I’ve always loved music visualizations — there are so many variables in music that the possibilities for visualization are endless, and breaking the visualization out of the screen and onto the natural landscape makes the work a breath of fresh air.  I think, however, that the visualization itself is a bit boring — there seems to be little variation in the forms.  More importantly, I don’t feel like I learn anything new about the music from the visualization, implying that the coupling between audio and visual is weak.

TANTRA is a mechanical and light based music visualization that drops ping pong balls onto a series of rotating paddles based on the note being played.  Similar to “We Need Nothing to Collide,” I love this concept for its ability to take music visualization outside of the screen.  The physicality to it is great, and the bouncing ping pong balls are especially playful.

I have the same criticism of this as I do of “We Need Nothing to Collide”: the link between music and visualization and movement is relatively shallow.  The clearest linkage is the relation between note played and ping pong ball dropped, but I’m not sure how the rotation of the paddles is supposed to figure into the equation.  It would be nice to see more variation in output based on variables in the music, but that would get complex pretty quickly considering the mechanical nature of the work.  The video documentation is edited a bit too frenetically for my taste, making it hard to actually get a long enough look at the machine for deeper interpretation.  Additionally, the beginning of the video made it seem that the sounds in the video would be coming from the mechanics itself, which was a awkward once it became obvious that the paddles were purely for bouncing and not at all for sound generation.

The same team that built the machine has done so previously, such as for Squarepusher.  I’m also reminded of the Chris Cunningham video for Aphex Twin’s “Monkey Drummer.”