JamesKatungyi – Looking outwards 11

Artist: Robert Henke

Title: Deep Web

Date: 2016

In Looking Outwards 4, I looked at music. This is about sound art. Robert Henke’s ‘laser orchestra’ together with Christopher Bauder’s ‘luminous kinetics’ come together in a phenomenal visual, acoustic 3d experience titled ‘The Web‘. The setting is a large hall rigged with motorised spheres and laser systems. The stage is the space above the audience where the multicoloured laser beams trace out the suspended spheres in colourful blasts synchronised to a musical score.

It seems that the laser beams are activated by the music. I would imagine that depending on the musical note or note combination, laser beams of a certain colour are activated in a given direction to a target sphere which illuminates when the beams strike it. The visual effect closely matches the audio. This, in my opinion, is the main artistic computational aspect of the show. The laser beams and sphere illuminations are mechanically driven.

In his bio, Robert Henke’s interests include space, technical objects. computer generated sound and images. Deep Web shows how he successfully synthesises all these in an artistic audio-visual experience.