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Vision Mahler
'Johannes Deutsch
Johannes Deutsch
“What a world this is that brings forth such sounds and shapes as its reflected likeness!”
Gustav Mahler
The musical performance of Gustav Mahler’s 2nd Symphony is interactively interconnected with the visual interpretation of the piece. The arrangement of the visualization concentrates on what the music expresses and the emotions it brings forth. Thus, Gustav Mahler’s cultural-historical setting and the sources of his own inspiration do not come into play in this visualization. This work is a matter of blending together two interpretations: one expressed musically and the other visually.
Eighteen three-dimensional objects constitute a virtual domain that depicts the universe of the 2nd Symphony on an abstract level. Analogously to the music, the objects of the visualization undergo a process of transformation that Mahler lets us experience auditorially in five movements. The thematic junctures and stages of the 2nd Symphony—suffering, romanticism, irony, love, doubt and hope—are correlated to the transformation of these virtual objects. In the first movement, for example, objects assemble, form structures and then break down; in the second movement they dance, radiate and shine; the third movement infuses the forms with irony and distorts them; love is aglow with light in the fourth movement, and is succeeded in the fifth by tremors and destruction; then objects burst, signaling an exodus from the virtual world. Not until the finale does redemption make its appearance—everything shimmers, sails and floats away.
While the objects are proceeding through the stages of the symphony, throbbing becomes visible on their own surfaces as if their pulses were beating or their lungs breathing. The degree to which the objects pulsate and how—and even whether—their radiance visibly manifests itself depends upon the music and the interpretation of it in the performance. The visuals are generated live and interact with the music that drives the virtual objects like a pacemaker. In this way, the visualization reflects the oscillating, almost excessive depiction of dramatic and lyrical components of the music—to a point that is tantamount to transference into the realm of the terpsichorean or the religious, and, at the same time, also brings out powerful expressions ranging from release and joy to the most profound anguish.
The transmutability of the objects is the precondition for capturing the symphonic uniqueness of the 2nd Symphony and enabling this quality to flow into the visualization.
Gustav Mahler’s compositions are widely admired for their ideal synthesis of word and music; nevertheless, what is especially fascinating to a media artist about the 2nd Symphony is its direct translation of meanings into music. Their sequential ordering in the music allows Mahler's statements to be understood literally, as it were, and the sequence of emotions triggered by the music projects a mental film in the mind of the person partaking of it. In striving to take full advantage of this potential, the 3-D space—both in the Philharmonic Hall and in the televised version—is used to produce a visual crescendo accompanying the music with brilliance and darkness, majesty and quaking tremors raining down on and pervading all the objects. The visualization’s objects expand to completely immerse and encompass all the senses of those partaking of it.
This visualization is by no means a work of animation; rather, it is a virtual world generated in real time and linked to the music. The visual dramaturgy is so plastic that the interpretation of the piece by conductor Semyon Bychkov and the WDR Symphony Orchestra can make a direct impact on the visualization of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony. This means that the interpretation of the orchestral work manifests itself not only in the music, but in the design of the visualization too.
On television, the visualization was depicted in a unique presentation format in order to allow the public watching on their home sets to really get a feel for this experimental, interactive concert event being performed live at the Philharmonic Hall. Special infrastructure within the software systems—devices that generate an interactive visual world in real time as a symbiosis of the musical and visual interpretations—functions as an intelligent, virtual “camera” to capture the digital artistic space created by Johannes Deutsch and the Ars Electronica Futurelab in the Philharmonic Hall and to represent it in a way that is customized to the point of view of the TV viewing audience. The information systems of the digital artistic realm calculate when, where and from what perspective the optimal interactive blend of music and visuals can be achieved for viewing by the television audience. In addition, attaining such dynamic virtual camera angles is facilitated by the use of movement patterns specifically programmed for this purpose. These preset camera paths along with special glasses help give the television audience the illusion of a spatial expansion of the TV image.
The virtual “camera” automatically co-generates these television images throughout the entire performance. Thus, a visualization of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony from several different angles is made available to the TV viewing audience. At the director’s console, the four direct TV channels of the visualization are combined with the images captured by the TV cameras set up in the Philharmonic Hall to engender a multi-layered visual realm.
Translated from German by Kristina Bausch and Mel Greenwald
Vision Mahler, the visualization of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor (Resurrection Symphony), premiered on January 1, 2006 in Cologne at a gala concert held to celebrate the 50th anniversary of WDR, a western German public broadcasting company. The work was performed under the direction of Semyon Bychkov before a live audience in Cologne’s Philharmonic Hall and simulcast on TV.
Artistic design of the concert: Johannes Deutsch and Ars Electronica Futurelab
Project team: Johannes Deutsch, Robert Abt, Florian Berger, Peter Freudling, Horst Hörtner, Andreas Jalsovec, Christopher Lindinger, Pascal Maresch, Stefan Mittlböck-Jungwirth, Nina Valkanova
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