Small Fish

2000

Wolfgang Muench (DE)
Kiyoshi Furukawa (JP)
Masaki Fujihata (JP)

"Small Fish" is an interactive painting which also generates music and can in some way be seen as the realization of the early 20th century dream of connecting music and image.

The basic idea of "Small Fish" is to use configuration, movements, and collisions of symbols, objects and images on the computer screen to generate MIDI code for controlling a flow of melody, harmony, and rhythm of music in realtime. The user can interact with this software like a music instrument. This can be called "Active Music Score" or "Interactive Graphical Music Instrument".

One aim of this work is to discover a conclusion in modern art history, modern paintings and modern music. The famous discussion surrounding Kandinsky's abstract paintings was how could the viewer receive the relation to the music from the experiences of viewing the paintings. The relation which can be captured depends on the strength of the user's imagination. Because the viewing process of the viewer could not happen in the way of interaction, all that was happening took place in the user's mind after he got the information visible in the painting. Interactive paintings, not paintings made interactively, were a dream of this style of painting.