Schlimmige Kreise – Input : Reason

In the realm of pure digital colors a distinct rush of sound emerges. Small circles in shades of blue and green, pink, violet and red generate themselves, adding up to form narrow, elongated, geometrically correct cylinders. As if in flight formations, they drift apart in a strictly symmetrical manner, only to immediately find each other once more. This visualization of music and work with abstractions is one of the main areas of activity of designer and video artist Tina Frank.  

Schlimmige Kreise – Input: Reason, distilled from recordings of live generated visuals, was created for a track by electronic music duo General Magic: a game with kaleidoscopically dancing shapes of variable degrees of sharpness, a kinetic sculpture made of electronic sequins. Tina Frank’s “schlimmige” circles, when excavated etymologically, are revealed to lie somewhere between neologism and paleologism, in phonetic proximity to the German words for “bad”, “moldy”, and “muddy”. However, there is indeed something mucilaginous at work here, since the artist utilized a program that digitally recreates the cohesive abilities of slime and applies them to mobile circular forms.  

As the noise factor increases in the second part of the audio track, the images suddenly begin to proliferate, monstrously and colorfully along artificial mirror axes, moving like buckets of color fields poured out in virtual action painting. "Input: Reason" is the name of the General Magic piece. Only the input of a trace of reason (read: conceptualism) completes the graphic improvisation into a fixed, accessible work. And actually, there’s a noble tradition of combining goo and the intellect: in 2008 the British rapper Roots Manuva titled one of his albums Slime & Reason. The song “Let the Spirit” says: “Real, reveal, rewind, we come again / Ever more bouncy / no need to re-announce me”. (Stefan Grissemann)

Translation: John Wojtowicz