Visual Music: from individual to collaborative motion graphic design / Visual Music: da motion graphic design individuale a collaborativo

This text is intended to describe the methods of visual translation of audio events used in the teaching experiences conducted at the Politecnico di Milano, in the Design courses, during over twenty years of activity, starting from 1999/2000 to date. In particular, over the years, the author, with her collaborators, has tried to define criteria, rules, and relationships between audio and video that would allow participants to design a single video project together. Then to define the rules for a collaborative project by, each year, refining more and more restrictive “rules”; that is, with a more defined audio / video relationship. In the history of visual music, from the origins of abstract cin¬ema in the early twentieth century, visual music film / video is recurrently a solitary, individual project; also in cases where - for the extent of the duration - this requires a team of collaborators, as in the case of Fischinger, of whom we have photographic evidence of the collaborator’s studio. However, these are groups that work under the direction of an author who has the functions of sole director. The objective of the research path presented here is therefore to define methods, criteria, and rules of audio / video correspondences that allow us to arrive at collaborative visual music projects in which the participants can be understood to be in equal measure “authors” and “directors ”of the project.