The 21st Century Color Organ and the Gridjam — A Lecture by Jack Ox :: November 20, 2008; 7:00 – 10:00 pm :: University of California, Santa Barbara, Studio Xenakis (Music 2215), Santa Barbara, CA.

Gridjam is an experimental project that brings together a visual artist, composer, musicians and computer and cyber-infrastructure scientists to produce a real-time, geographically distributed multimedia event utilizing the new high-speed international LambdaRail fiber optic network. It will demonstrate the artistic potential and power of instantaneous interactive distance computing and its application in a complex 4-D, scored and improvised, visual / musical performance. Gridjam is both a world-class work of art and a research project into collaborative high performance network computing. It will utilize artist Jack Ox and programmer David Britton’s Virtual Color Organ (which has already visualized Clarence Barlow’s “Im Januar am Nil”), visualizing composer Alvin Curran’s electronic music performed by musicians located in distant locales but connected via next generation networking technologies.

Jack Ox has studied beyond her MFA in visual arts at UCSD and has done considerable research in both music theory [Manhattan School of Music,NYC] and phonetics [U. of Cologne ] in order to produce a large body of work which is a visual mapping and structured understanding of music.

Her work includes visualizations of Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, Gregorian Chant, and Debussy’s Nuages. During her six year stay in Germany she made an 800 sq. ft. visualization of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate, the 41 minute long sound poem. While researching the Ursonate she came upon and caused to be published an original, completely unknown recording by Kurt Schwitters himself as a Cd on WERGO, Mainz, Germany. Ox participated in Vom Klang der Bilder at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in 1985, made an Ursonate presentation at the Centre Georges Pompidou during the Kurt Schwitters retrospective in Paris in 1994, and exhibited the complete cycle of 12 paintings based on Anton Bruckner’s 8th Symphony in 1996 at the Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz, Austria. In 2004 she showed the complete Ursonate at the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland, in conjunction with the first Polish Kurt Schwitters exhibition, which was sponsored by the German government. The exhibition also went to the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans. http://www.jackox.net/

Ox has been on the editorial board of Leonardo Journal for 20 years and was guest co-editor “Synesthesia and Intersense”. Since receiving initial start up funds from Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria in 1998 she has been collaborating with David Britton on The 21st. Century VirtualColor Organ ™,. The project received further support from NCSA at the U. of ILL,U-C, Boston U., SGI, EAI, Ox was a Visiting Fellow in the dept. of Computer Science, LUTCHI Research Centre, U. of Loughborough,UK, and a visiting artist at the Art / Technology Center and High Performance Computing at the U. of New Mexico as she began work on the current Color Organ project, Gridjam. Following her move from New Orleans to Albuquerque, she has become a Research Assistant Professor at UNM, continuing her work on Gridjam at the ARTS Lab, where she is artist in residence and a research associate. Ox was also a grant recipient of the Gottlieb Foundation. In 2007 she was appointed and Assistant Research Professor in the College of Fine Arts at UNM.