WHITE LINES, 20012, installation view, MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music, Bowling Green State University, 2012

WHITE LINES, 20012, installation view, MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music, Bowling Green State University, 2012

White Lines (2003-2012)

WHITE LINES is a modular, open-ended audio-visual composition, begun in 2003, that proposes music as condition of collective viewing in gallery or exhibition space by delivering the usually covert act of “reading” musical notation into visibility, sociality and interpretation via a series of projected video "movements." The work consists of a series of unordered, mostly silent live-action videos overlaid with subtly animated drawing—mainly a pair of parallel white lines bisecting the image that fluctuate in two legible ways: in width and in opacity/transparency. Interpreter-performers using any instrument can react to the notation by correlating these two visual parameters with any number of possible musical parameters, including changes in timbre, pitch, rhythm, harmonics, dynamics, gesture, duration and so on, thereby developing a musical approach to “reading” and performing the lines and their fluctuations. For every iteration of the work to date, including performances in Vienna, Perth, New York, Rome, Tbilisi and Barcelona, the process has been reimagined collaboratively with local performers. WHITE LINES has also been exhibited in non-concert settings, under which conditions it dually functions as musical notation for possible live performance by musicians, and as an implied composition or compositional proposal, to be imagined by viewers. 

Excerpts from two sequences of WHITE LINES,  a video-score by Marina Rosenfeld. Wether in exhibition or for performance, audio beginning around 4:22 is meant to be quiet, like the ambient level of a room tone. 

A four and a half minute excerpt from Ensemble Decibel's 2011 performance of WHITE LINES (2003-), featuring drummer Stuart James. The video shows a sequence from the WHITE LINES heard with Stuart's live performance.