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Bob Snyder (artist)

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Bob Snyder (born October 3, 1946) is an American composer, sound and video artist, who lives and works in Chicago.[1] His work focuses on the formal relations between electronic sounds and images, using synthesized visual and audio signals as his main medium. Throughout his career he has worked extensively with Sandin Image Processor, and his work has been featured in two Whitney Biennal exhibitions as well as institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the New York Public library and the Art Institute of Chicago.[2][3] Several of his works have been made in collaboration with the artists Phil Morton, Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin.[4][5] Snyder is also the founder of the sound department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in its present form,[6] where he was Professor Emeritus from 2016(?) until his retirement in 2022 after forty-six years at SAIC. He is the author of the book Music and Memory published by the MIT Press .[7][8] He is also the author of the "Memory for Music" chapter in the 2009 and 2016 editions of the Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology. In 2020, Snyder contributed a chapter entitled “Repetitions and Silences: A Music and Memory Supplement” to the anthology Composition, Cognition, and Pedagogy, published by the Brazilian Association of Cognition and Musical Arts. (ABCM).

Early life

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Snyder was born in 1946, in Kalamazoo, Michigan.[9] Between 1962 and 1965 he attended the Interlochen Arts Academy boarding high school where he played bass clarinet in the touring orchestra.[9][10] After graduating, Snyder studied composition and improvisation under the guidance of Bill Mathieu and Marjorie Hyams.[11] Interested in both painting and music, Snyder pursued formal education in composition at Indiana University's Bachelor of Music program, enrolling in 1966. He later transferred to Roosevelt University where he completed his BM in 1970. He received his Master of Music from Roosevelt in 1972.[11] During his studies he became interested in electronic music and began using an oscilloscope to explore the relation between audio and visual signals.[9]

Electronic visualization events

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Shortly after graduating, Snyder enrolled into Dan Sandin's video art class at the University of Illinois Chicago in Chicago, where he was introduced to and began working with Sandin's Image Processor (IP).[12] He later joined the Circle Graphics Habitat (today Electronic Visualization Laboratory), an interdisciplinary research group developed by Sandin and Tom DeFanti between 1973-75 that centered around the IP and DeFanti's Graphic Symbiosis System (GRASS).[13] While working with Sandin and DeFanti, Snyder met Phil Morton who at that time was teaching at the School of the Art Institute (SAIC) in Chicago. Snyder joined SAIC's faculty in 1974 and in 1976 became the head of the Sound Area, later expanded into School of the Art Institute's Sound Department.[14]

Together with the community of electronic media artists including Phil Morton, Dan Sandin, Tom DeFanti, Jane Veeder, Jamie Fenton, Barbara Sykes and others, Snyder participated in the Electronic Visualization Events (EVE) organized by the Circle Graphics Habitat—a series of group shows focusing on experimental media performance and image processing.[15][16] The first iteration of EVE, held in April 1975, featured a collaborative performance by Snyder-Morton-Sandin-DeFanti called Peano Boogie, an improvised piece for which Snyder provided the soundtrack.[13] The group performed again a year later at the second EVE, showing their interactive work Ryral,[13] for which Snyder used SAIC's EMU sound synthesizer.[17] In the third event, which took place in May 1978, the group, joined by Jane Veeder, Sticks Raboin and Rylin Harris, performed a piece called Spiral 3. During the show Snyder's collaboration with Morton and Guenther Tetz titled Data Bursts in 3 moves was also shown.[18]

Individual works

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Snyder began recording his own IP experiments on videotape in 1974,[12] eventually assembling his own copy of the machine.[6] In his individual practice, Snyder focused on exploring video's and sound's shared formal properties.[12] As he has explained in the article "Video Color Control by Means of an Equal-Tempered  Keyboard" :

My hope was that both light and sound could be controlled from the same set of formal assumptions, and that I could develop characteristic interval structures which would operate successfully in both areas.[19]

In Lines of Force,[20][21] created in 1979 and later featured in the Whitney Biennale's Video Program in 1981,[22] abstract synthesized images are modulated with found-footage, such as video documentation of military tests and various recordings of television broadcast. Edited through a series of match-cuts, the piece follows a logic of a visual pun, juxtaposing shots sharing visual similarities. The soundtrack for the piece was composed after the visual part was finished.[11]

In 1981, Snyder completed Trim Subdivisions,[23][24] which has been featured at MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Whitney Museum.[25] Shot in suburban Indiana, and unlike most of Snyder's work, Trim Subdivision has no sound,[26][11] and uses a wide range of editing techniques such as wipe-cuts in a playful deconstruction of site's uniform architecture.

From 1979 to 1984 he worked on his piece Spectral Brands,[27] which was the first piece in which Snyder used the Image Processor keyboard interface. The instrument allowed for the increased control over the machine, dividing its color space into 34220 separate colors[12] organized according to the modified equal temperament tuning system.[19]

In the late 2000s, Snyder produced a series of sound installations through Chicago's Experimental Sound Studio, including projects such as Orniphonia 2, made in 2013 as part of the ESS's Florasonic series,[28] and Pseudorniphones, installed for the 2005 Outer Ear Festival of Sound in Chicago.[29] For both of the works, Snyder created intricate soundscapes composed out of synthesized audio signals mimicking the sounds of songbirds.[28][29]

In 2018, Snyder work was included in the Chicago 1973-1992 exhibition at Gallery 400. The exhibition was curated by jonCates.[30]

In 2021, Snyder collaborated with photographer Sara Livingston on the short film, One Year Dark, which was selected “Best Micro-Short” in the “Paris International Short Festival”, in September 2021.

Selected works

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Winter Notebook 1975
Icron 1978
Lines of Force 1979
Trim Subdivisions 1981
Spectral Brands 1981
Hard and Flexible Music 1984
Pseudorniphones 2005
Orniphonia 2 2013
One Year Dark 2021

References

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  1. ^ "Bob Snyder". Video Data Bank. Retrieved 1 March 2018.
  2. ^ DORIN, LISA. "‘HERE TO STAY’: COLLECTING FILM, VIDEO, AND NEW MEDIA AT THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO." Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2009, pp. 6–110. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40651623.
  3. ^ "MFCP: 'Palais de Mari,' Music & Memory". Experimental Sound Studio. 22 October 2016. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
  4. ^ Kirkpatrick, Diane (1978). Chicago: The City and Its Artists 1945-1978. the University of Michigan Museum of Art. p. 38.
  5. ^ Jimenez, Mona; et al. (2014). The Emergence of Video Processing Tools, Vol. 2. Intellect Books. p. 601.
  6. ^ a b Jimenez, Mona; et al. (2014). The Emergence of Video Processing Tools, Vol. 2. Intellect Books. p. 370.
  7. ^ Pepperell, Robert. "Leonardo." Leonardo, vol. 35, no. 3, 2002, pp. 335–336. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1577131.
  8. ^ Miller, S. M. "Bob Snyder: Music and Memory: An Introduction (review)." Computer Music Journal, vol. 26 no. 2, 2002, pp. 98-100. Project MUSE,
  9. ^ a b c Amirkhanian, Charles (1985). "Speaking of Music: Bob Snyder". Radiom.org. Retrieved 1 March 2018.
  10. ^ "Crescendo: Motifs". Interlochen Center For the Arts. April 2014. Retrieved 2 March 2018.
  11. ^ a b c d Franca, Rafael (Interviewer) (1985). Bob Snyder: An Interview. Video Data Bank.
  12. ^ a b c d Tamblyn, Christine (1991). "Image Processing in Chicago Video Art, 1970-1980". Leonardo. 24 (5): 307. doi:10.2307/1575572. JSTOR 1575572. S2CID 61756440.
  13. ^ a b c Kirkpatrick, Diane (1978). Chicago: The City and Its Artists 1945-1978. the University of Michigan Museum of Art. p. 206.
  14. ^ Cates, jon (May 2009). COPY-IT-RIGHT! Media Art Histories of Open Collaboration and Exchange (PDF) (Thesis). Danube University Krems.
  15. ^ Tamblyn, Christine (1991). "Image Processing in Chicago Video Art, 1970-1980". Leonardo. 24 (5): 306. doi:10.2307/1575572. JSTOR 1575572. S2CID 61756440.
  16. ^ "IEVE : Interactive Electronic Visualization Event". Electronic Visualization Laboratory. Retrieved 2 March 2018.
  17. ^ Kirkpatrick, Diane (1978). Chicago: The City and Its Artists 1945-1978. the University of Michigan Museum of Art. p. 41.
  18. ^ Electronic Visualization Event 3. Media Burn Archive. 1 May 1978.
  19. ^ a b Snyder, Robert R. (1985). "Video Color Control by Means of an Equal-Tempered Keyboard". Leonardo. 18 (2): 93–95. doi:10.2307/1577876. ISSN 1530-9282. JSTOR 1577876. S2CID 61599102.
  20. ^ "Lines of Force." Lines of Force | Video Data Bank, www.vdb.org/titles/lines-force.
  21. ^ "Lines of Force, 1979." The Art Institute of Chicago, www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/199057.
  22. ^ Whitney Museum of American Art (1981). 1981 Biennial exhibition. Frances Mulhall Achilles Library Whitney Museum of American Art. Whitney Museum of American Art.
  23. ^ Snyder, Bob. "Bob Snyder. Trim Subdivisions. 1981 | MoMA." The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/collection/works/120232.
  24. ^ "Trim Subdivisions, 1981." The Art Institute of Chicago, www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/108764?search_no=1&index=0.
  25. ^ Glueck, Grace (24 April 1983). "Video Comes into its Own at the Whitey Biennial". The New York Times. ProQuest 122150235.
  26. ^ "CATALOGUE". Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies. 35 (1). The Art Institute of Chicago: 23. 2009.
  27. ^ "Spectral Brands." Spectral Brands | Video Data Bank, www.vdb.org/titles/spectral-brands.
  28. ^ a b "FLORASONIC: Bob Snyder: 'Orniphonia 2'". Experimental Sound Studio. 3 March 2013. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
  29. ^ a b "Outer Ear Festival Of Sound 2005". www.expsoundstudio.org. Archived from the original on 2007-07-17. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
  30. ^ Cates, Jon (2018). Chicago New Media, 1973-1992. Illinois, United States: University of Illinois Press. p. 21. ISBN 978-0-252-08407-2.
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