Artist Statement

Performance

As a visual artist, my motivation for creating an interactive video system stemmed from an increasing dissatisfaction with the major limitation of visual media. After finding myself associating with more musicians than visual artists, this limitation became increasingly obvious and an envy developed for musicians and their manner for creating art. These new associations led me to the conclusion that musical media, such as live music, are primarily concerned with life, while visual media, such as painting, drawing and sculpture, are concerned with that opposite state of being, death.

This difference becomes obvious by comparing the experience of visual media with the experience of live music. In a museum or gallery, for example, visitors calmly stare at inanimate objects on display, rarely speaking and never clapping or cheering in approval. These viewers are like the bereaved at a wake, paying respect to a friend who will soon be entombed in the nether world of a gallery’s storage room. What could be so different from the experience of the visual art than a live music performance? While music performances come in a variety of styles, from classical to new music to rap, they all provoke audiences to clapping, cheering, dancing and a whole range of physical activities which are strictly verboten in a museum of fine arts.
This goal is being pursued through performances containing large video projected imagery and live improvised music. During these events, image selection and cinematic effects are intricately associated with the music’s formal structure as an attempt to capture the spontaneity of live music with video.
The result of the pursuance has been the development of an interactive video system and the presentation of numerous international performances in which audiences witness the birth and existence of an interactive video controlled by live improvised music.
https://www.aesthetic-machinery.com/articles-way-of-life.html

• Don Ritter is a Canadian artist and writer who has worked internationally in media art since 1988. His works are primarily interactive video performances and installations controlled by live music or body gestures. Ritter’s work uses Orpheus, an intelligent software that provides a rule-based structure for controlling video through music or sensors. Ritter began writing Orpheus during his graduate studies at MIT. Since then, he has presented interactive video-music performances at festivals, galleries and museums, including New Music America 89 (NYC), Art Institute of Chicago, The Verona Jazz Festival (Italy), MIT Media Lab (Boston), STEIM (Amsterdam), A Space (Toronto) and The Kitchen (NYC). During these performances, Ritter collaborated mostly with musicians George E. Lewis, Thomas Dimuzio and Trevor Tureski. Ritter completed his graduate degree in visual studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT Media Lab and Harvard University’s film department. He has undergraduate degrees in fine arts and psychology from the University of Waterloo and a diploma in electronics engineering from NAIT. Since 1989, Ritter has been a full-time assistant professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. https://aesthetic-machinery.com