Martine Chartrand (Black Soul, 2001) creates on average two minutes of animation per year of steady work. © 2001, National Film Board of Canada.

I submit that it is in that very loss of identity, "now you see it, now you don't," that the poetic sense of a piece is born, and maintained.

I did talk at length about much of that in most of my six "Notes from the Underground," but this article seems like a good opportunity to review some of those points. Just as painting was put through a "grinder" of sorts when the likes of Monet, Cézanne, Kandinsky and many others could not help but depart from the norms of the 19th Century "official art" (academic, salon painting), and, in doing so, "exploded" what had until then been accepted/imposed as "The" canon of "acceptable" art and as "The" definition of pictorial space, I posit we need to do the same with regard to the "dumb" pictorial space imposed by most (please note: "most," not "all") of the habitual ways so prevalent in 3D animation and, indeed, sometimes in visual music as well.

By the way, much 2D suffers from the same plight, the source of all that being buried in the artist's worldview, his/her Weltanschauung, where the real "limitations" reside (see my "Notes" again).

Just as those 19th century visionaries did, when exploding socially accepted norms of their time, finding ways to escape the narrow "positive/negative" bi-dimensional space tyranny, and discovering/exploring "equivocal space" or "a-dimensional space" in the process, we need to discover/create ways of exploding the "habitual space" of animation/visual music, a space that seems to be the trap in which many people fall when dealing with "moving art."

McDonnell finally got to see Larry Cuba's Calculated Movements at VMM. She found that it had a real modern twist, but the graphic forms were very beautiful in their precision and evolution over time. © Larry Cuba (www.well.com/user/cuba).

The underlying form of most animated works today is one that is totally taken for granted, while great artists had/have to discover/rediscover it each time, in order to make it visible (as in "Art is what makes us see," or Art is about "making the visible visible").

Look at most storytelling animation; it starts and remains in a "space" that is never challenged, never threatened, a "space" that never undergoes any kind of metamorphosis. That space acts as a "container" that is totally taken for granted, and all that happens happens "within it," that "space" is, in fact, never "seen," indeed, never "made visible."

Bereft of the linear and reliable structure a story can provide, especially on a cognitive level, visual music has to articulate itself within different parameters (lots of possible variables here), and quite often, it does so by a series of "switches" that articulate/modulate/make visible the "space" in which they happen, and this in ways far more potent than what is habitually done in storytelling animation. The music the animation works with/from is itself so prone to multiple readings, the animation can follow now "this," now "that," anticipate "this" or/and "that," recall "this" and/or "that," ignore "this" and/or "that," the freedom/range of potential choices is immense, probably infinite.

In visual music, much of what happens is a transposition, a metaphor, there really is "no-thing" to tell, and this contributes greatly to giving visual music its poetic impact ("Art is what makes life more interesting than art," wrote Robert Filliou).

That "getting lost in the midst of all the possible metaphors" provides a sense of "space" that is huge, infinite, but which also demands much from the creator, as it is as easy to be lost in "all that" as it is to avoid being lost by attaching oneself to simplistic elements (hence my referring to the "human metronome" possibility earlier).

There is "getting lost and choking," and there is "doing one's best when one no longer knows what to do." The latter too is a key, an important one at that! Too many people are led to believe that art is about knowledge, too many students are deceived into believing it is all about learning "how to." I guess this is "normal" given that our universities have increasingly become vocational schools, training students for "jobs" instead of fulfilling their original Socratic mission ("Know Thyself").

Amongst the greatest artists, Cézanne was most aware of, and worked with, "echoing shapes" (more on that again in my "Notes"). He, of course, worked on "still images" (so to speak), yet the structure of much music is such that elements can repeat themselves over time, either identically, and/or through variations, and the Visual Music artist is thus offered a great opportunity to enable/make visible those "echoing shapes" on the temporal plane, a fabulous privilege/responsibility if there ever was one!