Wednesday, September 06, 2006

"Prelude to Intelligent Ambient"


Today i was reading about the Philips Pavillion designed by Le Corbusier for the 1958 World Fair.

The Poeme Electronique, composed by Edgard Varese and the interlude by Iannis Xenakis were meant to be the augmented experience of this architecture.
Architecture, images and sounds were thought altogether as a single element and the public was inteded to feel this unity.
The project venture is pretty intriguing, so i made some further reaserches on the web...
I found a cool link to the INART department of the PennState, where there are more info about the pavillion, the music components and the technologies that were applied.

  • INART

  • I already knew that the design was made by Xenakis and that the shape of the building recalled his composition work for Metastaseis and about the disputes between him and LeCorb for the awknowledge of the design...i totally missed such a detailed description of the technologies, the diverse problems and the casual combination of images/sound!
    When the Pavillion was torn after the end of the Fair, everything went lost about the experience that public had of an experiement that many define as the Prelude of the Intelligent Ambient (which probably was indeed)... and only sound remanis for us.


    I had never heard the Poeme Electronique before, which is also considered a masterpiece of early electronic music... so i was curious and after some failures..(the web doesnt make things easy all the time) and 5 or 6 excerpts, i finally found a link to the Medien Kunst Netz with the entire piece! I could find only an excerpt of Concrete PH, composed by Xenakis for the interlude between the different flows of public...

  • Poeme Electronique

  • ConcretePH
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