“Galileo’s First Glimpse” by Craig R. Harris
Title:
- Galileo’s First Glimpse
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Artist Statement:
Galileo’s First Glimpse characterizes the moment when Galileo viewed through his first telescope. In an instant the world that has been intersects with the world of possibilities. The synapse created in their intersection transforms perception, and the world can never be seen in the same way again. These moments of dramatic metamorphosis provide opportunities to examine our existence and our goals as individuals, and as members of a global and universal community. The music incorporates recorded and transformed vocal tones, digitized water-phone performed on a sampler, and gentle synthesized tones, woven into a fabric of merging and converging sound worlds. Graphics are created by Lorren Stafford, using a system for converting sound signals into visual representations based on Fast Fourier Transforms, in an interactive setting for manipulation patterns, palette and motion. Galileo’s First Glimpse was created for live performance, and was premiered at the 1995 Divergent Streams/Convergent Dreams festival in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The excerpt presented at ISEA96 is from a video version that had its premiere at the VIII Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing.
