Larry Cuba.

And, I am merely talking about the only facet of visual music I am "qualified" to speak of, the visual aspect created on/from an already existing music.

I can only imagine what it must be like for a musician to work "from the other end," to look at a stream of silent images and try to give them a voice and, just as we visual artists are in front of music, be confronted with an infinity of possible (and impossible!) choices.

Many of the films screened during the Marathon were made by artists who made both images and music (had I had a sense that this was possible when I was a kid, I may not have skipped my piano lessons as much as I did).

I strongly suspect both the visual artist and the musician connect to, at times, similar "things" ("things" indeed as defining this more would be too limiting).

The exchanges between images and sounds are very potent; images inform the music just as much as the music informs the images. When, in 2005, I made my two NFB films (Liaisons and Rupture) in collaboration with the great Montréal-based composer Jean Derome, we kept remarking to each other how much his music made me see my images like never before, how much my images made him hear his music differently.

This is essential stuff, "perception is constitutive" (again, if interested, refer to my "Notes" to investigate this further), and it is precisely in/through the emphasis we notice and make manifest ("make visible/audible") uniquely that we reveal, and share, our humanity.

I guess almost no film, in that large collection of works, was trying to "tell us" anything other than presenting itself. There was practically no "message," and, to my great relief, this festival was spared what is becoming a real plight in "habitual animation" festivals. There were practically no "self-promotional" pieces, none of the films had that awful "schoolish-careerist-bad-taste-in-the-mind" feel that it used to be SIGGRAPH's special fate to attract, but which has now infested other festivals as well.

From Larry Cuba's list of favorite films is Semiconductor’s 200 Nanowebbers (music: Double Adaptor, 2005). © Semiconductor.

No, we were graced with one poetic piece after another -- films. We were spared the "Look Ma, no hands!" pabulum that we have to endure so much elsewhere.

VMM was about art and music, "visual music," and did it ever deliver!

In "regular" festivals, one has to sit through long programs made of mostly linear, storytelling, figurative work in order to see a few token pieces of visual music. That makes it very difficult to get a real sense of where that art form is today.

VMM not only gave us a terrific historical context (a bit of an eye opener for me, as I was not really aware of how far back in time this research actually reached) it also gave us the broadest, largest cross-section of what is being done today that I have ever seen (I was amazed at the quality and number of its practitioners, lots of talent -- and honesty -- "out there").

Much came out of that for me, some clearly, some still incubating, but I left Boston with a huge baggage of "food for thought," eyes filled with magnificent images, head spinning with inspiring music, amazed at the kinds of "connections" artists had found/created/made visible between visual form and musical form, and my heart is now filled with gratitude for such a beneficial shot in the arm!

Jean Detheux's work appeared on best films lists by various colleagues. Liaisons (pictured, 2005), Rupture (2005) and Daydream Mechanics V Sketch 3 (2006). © National Film Board of Canada, 2005. All rights reserved.

I'll indulge a bit here in more of the thoughts generated by VMM. I think 3D really has serious problems when in the hands of "plumbers" (again, refer to my "Notes from the Underground" to see what I mean by that). Indeed, several pieces seemed to become interchangeable as they obviously were all relying on the plumbing of the software that was used. A generic 3D "look" was emerging through the close proximity in time of so many pieces done similarly with similar tools.

I guess this is due in part to the fact that, in 3D, the "pictorial space" is a given, while, in 2D, it is an accomplishment, a reward, possibly the real goal of the work.

This is to me an essential difference between 3D and 2D, and if 3D has given us magnificent pieces, overall it seems to be condemned to a "box" when used by "plumbers," too often devoid of any sense of poetry (I suspect this lack of poetry comes from the fear of one's ambiguity and the unwillingness/inability of the artist to let him/herself drift into unresolved areas, a severe lack of faith in one's own darkness). I think 3D is making it so easy to lock in "objects," that it takes a special artist to allow those objects to come under attack from other elements, the very locus of space itself included, and, if only temporarily, to lose their/its identity.