McDonnell likes the simplicity of the visual forms and their link with sine tones in Dissonant Particles 9 © Gordon Monro.

Add to that (although I believe this precedes everything else, always) the very structure of attention itself (that constant swing from "Where is it?" to "Aha, there it is!" see my "Notes" on that), and you have a 'brew" in which just about anything can happen.

Visual music is a demanding art form, but it definitely is a rewarding one as well, for both the doer and the viewer (which often can be facets of the "same" person, possibly at odds with each other).

And that brings me to one of the most obvious impressions that I took from the Visual Music Marathon: visual music is a vibrant -- and major -- art form, and its performance in Boston was so strong, it now is even clearer to me that it is not being served well by the way "habitual animation festivals" treat and present it.

Far from it! It deserves better, and it received better during the Visual Music Marathon.

When talking to Larry Cuba of the iota Center during the festival, I mentioned that VMM felt a bit like the "Salon des refusés," a group exhibition that was showing the works of artists who had been refused by the official Salon de Paris during the second half of the 19th Century, a group of artists consisting of people we still very much remember today (Manet, Monet, Cézanne, Pissarro, Whistler and many more), while those who were in the official Salon have been (often mercifully) forgotten, at least most of them.

I make a parallel with the "Salon des defuses," because I see the official selections of most of the animation festivals I am familiar with repeat, year after year after year, a pattern of "more of the same" (films praying, for the most part, to the gods of "Life is a bitch and then you die"). These selections are definitely the voice of the "official Salon," and if people are not aware of what the Visual Music Marathon revealed to its audience, they may come to think that the official voice is showing "all there is."

Not quite, not quite.

The beautiful Kyoto Bells (2006) is a simple square progressively modified by the evolving processed sound of a bell. © Wilfried Jentzsch.

What puzzles me in this state of affairs is that I see in visual music much that could renew what is being done, again and again, in "habitual animation" and yet is being brushed aside: different ways to create and relate to animated pictorial space, a different discourse that needs an intelligent public to exist, and which can help elevate its public's thought (again, "Art is a religion, its aim is the elevation of thought"), a reaching for the best we all have in us. In essence, it is the opposite of the catering to the lowest common denominator with which our society and culture are becoming more and more identified.

Also, there are at least two "flavors" of visual music -- one is harsh, dry, bare, hard, aggressive, the other is warm, generous, "moist," inviting. I am, in this, reminded of the two major facets of early abstraction -- "hard edged" and "expressionistic" (much more could be said about this, there is no hinting of competition between the two in my statement).

The very same "divisions" exist in the world of music as well, and there is no intention here of making one "better" than the other.

However, when I consider "habitual animation" in the context presented above, I can barely see it as art, at best as "illustration," and a very conventional form of illustration at that, again, most often it is merely a form of commercial "art," a "sub-genre."

For example, here's an email I recently received from a young and very gifted art student interested in "animation as an art form." Here's part of what he said after attending his first animation festival ever: "... .a lot of the work was disappointing and the guest speakers preached the importance of withholding personal vision to maybe someday work on the shading of Jimmy Neutron, animation as career, animation as expression seemed non-sensical to them."