Adinda van 't Klooster:

Fertility and Pinopods in Art

Performance Piece: Sarah was Ninety Years Old

Adinda van 't Klooster, Video stills from live performance, 2004

Alongside the installation work, Adinda van 't Klooster also developed an interactive performance piece in collaboration with the famous music department of Gloucester Cathedral. There were two key influences here:
1. Olivier Messiaen a composer working in the early 20th century, who had a rare form of synaesthesia, causing him to see colours with his music.
2. A piece of music called Sarah was Ninety Years Old by Arvo Pärt based on a story from the Bible about a woman (Sarah) who gave birth at 90 years old.

Using the musical score as a starting point, Adinda van 't Klooster created a visual storyboard to coincide with the music, based on the individual qualities of the voices and instruments and the musical structure of the score.

She then worked with programmers Martin Robinson and David Stevens who used Max/MSP Jitter (currently used by VJs) to create the interface. This program translated the music into colours and images: each singer and instrument had a microphone linked to the computer so that the slightest change in volume or pitch became 'visually audible'. The resulting animated video was a mixture of obstetrical images, minimal abstract elements and changing colour fields.

Adinda van 't Klooster, Video stills from live performance, 2004

During the performance the audience members were seated in the Slype facing a large projection screen and the musicians were spread throughout the cloisters behind them. The video projection was thus created live by the computer and the musicians (Tenors: Peter Morton and Ralph Barlow; Soprano: Emma Walsche; Percussion: Sophie Walters; Organ and Musical Director: Simon Kirk). The projected images would change with each performance, responding, for example, to a singer's movements towards, or away from, the microphone, or their change in volume. When there was silence, no image would appear.

The visual score thus created has since been used by some musicians from the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra as a visual score to perform to. Thus, a new improvised piece of music was created by Graeme Wilson (Saxaphone), Giles Lamb (Keyboard), Neil Davidson (Guitar/Keyboard) and George Lyle (Bass). This was then re-used again by the artist as a starting point for a ten-minute short film.

Adinda van 't Klooster, Video stills from live performance, 2004

Links
uksynaesthesia.com

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