Laura Hiebert - Visual Music

Visual Music

Ultrafett Typografie Festival (2020)

Music: Sara Sara by Bufiman

The Visual Music project was created as part of a seminar at the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences for the Ultrafett Typography Festival 2021. The goal of the seminar was to create a virtual stage for the speakers as well as window projections for the festival.

Inspired by the festival itself, as well as the music assigned to me, I decided to illustrate the history of writing and reading signs in a new way. The project was the first contact with animation, after I had previously drawn analog in my studies. So I felt comfortable with the decision to combine drawing and video in a stop motion animation. It starts with reading traces and ends with scripture as we know it today. Stations in between include cave painting, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, linear A and B, the sumerian cuneiform alphabet, Albrecht Dürer's typometric studies and gothic fonts. The changing forms of writing are the focus of the work. For this purpose, the course of individual letters of "ULTRAFETT" is shown over and over again. Signs and drawings that were created manually were also reworked manually. Apart from the idea that the video should work well as a projection, the decision to keep it black and white has to do with the fact that I deliberately put the focus on the shapes and structures. Color would distract from that.

Part of the seminar were workshops to get an overview of different implementation possibilities. One highlight was a workshop with the video artist Susi Sie, in which we experimented with analog video techniques. But there were also other exciting workshops, such as stage construction or for the program »Resolume Arena«.

An important milestone in the process was an exercise to edit a video to music using three short loops. The tool could be freely chosen. I decided to stay abstract and draw digitally. The music was picked from a pre-selection for the festival.

Music: One Inch Punch by YĪN YĪN

The exercise was a great source of inspiration for the final result. In addition to the planned virtual stage, the videos were to be projected on the facade of the design department. The black-and-white contrast lent itself to this, and I also found the effect of the video having a black frame that gets larger as it progresses exciting with regard to the distortion of perception that this creates in the dark.