Interdisciplinary work on a Video Visiography
Archetypal association contexts
of sound and image
The surface structure of Klaus Damm’s works offers something direct and tangible in all media: echoes of physicality, frugal, or crystalline structures, elementary rhythmic and melodic output cells, and spatial sound forms. These elements combine deeper in the structure to become polyphonically interwoven archetypal association contexts – orbiting universes beyond time. Both strange and familiar worlds thus emerge: inward paths to completeness.
Sound Composition
Sound, rhythm, and melody cells are modulated to create various design forms. A single cell therefore becomes the starting point for moving surfaces, percussive stops, linear networks, substructures, and lights. New structures emerge: rhythmically and metrically structured or amorphous, melodically comprehensible or interwoven into turbulent hyperspace.
Decomposition and permuted montage
In this way, on the design level, different cell variants run canon-like into parallel layers. These then break up again into groups which are in turn reinterpreted: temporally by expansion, compression, cuts, and permutations and sonically by filter and modulation processes, spatial positioning, and layer displacement.
During montage and mixing, cross-layer and group (inter) modulation and sound expansion processes result in a static whole with structures moving within themselves from which simple design elements are modeled on the surface.
Image Composition
Klaus Damm developed his own image composition method in the form of the "Visiography": he used a complex montage technique to condense his input photographic materials to their emotional and creative core.
Visiography development
For Klaus Damm, stylization began with taking photographs: with the choice of perspective, lens, focus, and lighting scenarios. It continued with RAW developing where he abstractly created stylized versions. He superimposed these to form multiple layers with expressive dimensions from other motifs. Through numerous "offsets" and modified "attitudinal levels", Klaus Damm created a wide spectrum of complex energy scenarios – within his concise pictorial language.
Using this basic structure, Klaus Damm created "image clouds" of up to several hundred associated Visiographies. He categorized these based on parameters relating to composition and expression with which he formed groups over parameter intersections.
These allowed the artist to work with defined structural processes in series of Visiographies – produced as large prints under acrylic, as image sequences in graphic reproduction portfolios and ultimately as input materials for moving image structures.
Moving Image Composition
Klaus Damm composed series from the image cloud like musical elements creating moving image structures known as "Video Visiographies". Transitions between Visiographies, which are interrelated in different ways, provide the basis for movement as well as direct dynamic intervention in the layer structure of the Visiographies.
Klaus Damm applied structural processes similar to "parameter counterpoint" from the music of Webern serialism: here, a parameter – such as chromaticity – can undergo a specific slow transformation process, while other parameters – such as planarity or structural division – follow other processes with different speed structures.
Layers are also superimposed in the moving image composition, partly using templates formed from image structures. Structural differentiation arises through interventions in temporal and transitional processes, interchange, offsetting modes, changes in opacity, and other processes which Klaus Damm used to stock his virtual palette with a broad spectrum of design forms and expressive forms.
Video composition from series of Visiographies
Sound and Image Composition
Klaus Damm’s Video Visiographies feature a cross-media, polyphonic relationship between sound and image, a composed tension with moments of convergence and distance between the layers. The compositional principles are based on post-serial processes of New Music and are applied in equal measure to music and image layers. This whole provides a dense synaesthetic perception of the sound and image composition.
Unity in Diversity
Klaus Damm’s compositions transcend barriers between art sectors and are designed so that the individual dimensions – music, Visiography, Video Visiography – can be performed collectively or individually. At the same time, music and image layers are independent works in their own right, albeit composed in relation to one another: a metaphor for a whole, whose parts – although true in themselves – always only convey a certain perspective on a more all-embracing truth. A potentially endless sound and image cosmos moving within itself, representing unity from vibrant diversity – both static and growing, a "glass bead game".
English translation of the German original. Deutsche Fassung
