Coriolan Ouvertüre / Ludwig van Beethoven (original) (raw)

Commissioned by WDR for their program „Augen auf! Beethoven“ in the frame of Beethoven Jahr 2020: (Editor: Tuula Simon)

I had the great pleasure to be invited as one of 6 visual artists to participate in this program.

WDR Sinfonieorchester, conducted by Günter Wand

On the real-time visualization of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture

The aim is to express the ambivalence, disruption and inner restlessness of Collins Coriolanus, which Beethoven very significantly expressed in his overture.
But it is also about Shakespeare’s strong motif of Coriolanus’ fateful entanglement and his struggle for independence and identity.
Hence the doubling or mirroring of the graphics, whose elements then move in very different and contradictory ways. These differences come purely from the sonic difference between the left and right channels of the stereo recording.
In general, all movements are directly and exclusively triggered and determined by the sound of the music.

The graphics refer to three characters of the story:

Coriolanus (the black multi-segment vector),

the Volsker (the blue and orange polygons)

and the women and the family (the fine curved lines).

They act together in a kind of ballet in which the music itself takes over the choreography.