Performed at The Warehouse, Hanover (NH), 2024
Video excerpts of 'La máquina de color'
The “color machine” is a digital instrument built in Max MSP/ Jitter which translates color into sound and sound into color. The project emanated after I learned how to paint with oil in the fall of 2024, and from a deep curiosity I felt for the works of Bauhaus painters like Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy and Albers.
Ever since I found out about this unique German school, I have been asking the question of how did music and sound dialogue with art, architecture, and functional design developed at the university. Since not much documentation exists on actual music being created at the Bauhaus, (and knowing that the Western music at the time was the perfect definition of elitist art) I’ve made free conclusions about functional music, and believe that examples of Bauhaus sound might be found in the likes of Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, and maybe bands like Harmonia, Stereolab, etc. So, in that aesthetic/philosophical thread of thought, I presented the first version of this instrument in front of an audience on behalf of my radiophonic/ musical project, Radiotrónica. For this occasion, apart from pure/basic RGBA explorations, I used a documentary on the painter Henri Matisse as color source, and projected both sound-color explorations on a couple of two CRT TVs.
My ultimate wish with this radio band/project is to develop a sort of “aether poetics” that finds beauty and poetry in the channels of communication between the arts, between the waves, in the pythagorean rhythms of the universe.
Rodrigo performing his 'color machine' before an audience, November 2024.