Woven
Since 2001, for the past 20 years, Dan and I have been collaborating as Spectralina. I’m a visual artist and Dan is a musician, and thus Spectralina creates an image-sound relationship that treats each medium as equal, resulting in performances and animated films in which projection and sounds come together as visual music.
This site specific audio visual work we made for Art on the Mart, the Chicago year of music, is called Woven. It is an analog hand drawn animation, which I drew by hand, frame by frame, marker on paper, responding to the music composed by Dan, which was luckily recorded in the week before the pandemic lockdown began, the last collaborative project for most of us.
For Woven we envisioned the Merchandise Mart façade serving as not just our projection surface but also as our weaving loom—our music and animation are the threads that create the fabric in this loom.
Writing music is much like weaving—sounds are woven together to create a composition. This music weaves together sounds and genres from Chicago’s rich musical history in homage to the beauty and creativity cultivated here.
The animation is based on woven patterns I found in the culturally diverse neighborhoods of Chicago. These patterns weave, transform, and reconstitute themselves in response to the music, morphing from one pattern into the next.
This music was made by Dan Bitney with the wonderful musicians collaborating on this track.
Jaimie Branch
John Herndon
Jeff Parker
Dustin Laurenzi
Norman Long
The music was recorded by Todd Carter