Jack Ox is an

intermedia Intermedia is an art theory term coined in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe various interdisciplinarity art activities that occur between genres, beginning in the 1960s. It was also used by John Brockman to refer to work ...

artist and an acknowledged pioneer of music visualization. Since the 1970s Ox has produced works in response to diverse musical sources, including Gregorian chant, the classical concert tradition and the sound poetry of

Kurt Schwitters Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including dadaism, Constructivism (art), constructivism, surrealism ...

. The primary goal of Ox's work is to create an intimate correspondence between visual and musical languages. She has also worked with the composer Alvin Curran. In the catalog of Ox's 2003 Visualizing Music exhibition at the Museum of Art in Lodz, Poland, critic David S. Rubin explained the core principle of Ox's work as "...a desire to bond visual and aural information ... the impetus for the artistic journeys of Jack Ox since 1977, the year that she began basing her paintings and drawings on musical compositions. Trained in both visual art and musicology, Ox has over the past twenty-five years been developing mathematical systems for analyzing music and then 'recomposing' it in a language of her own invention." Swiss art historian Phillipe Junod discussed Ox's work in his 1988 book, ''La Musique vue par les Peintres'' (Painters Look at Music). Junod describes the early projects in which Ox worked with the music of Bach, Stravinsky, and Debussy, before creating a cycle o
paintings based on the eighth Bruckner symphony
Ox began this work in 1983, completing it eight years later in 1991. Junod emphasizes the conceptual rigor of Ox's work, developing each of Bruckner's symphonic themes. Each painting in the suite covers a sequence of ten to twenty measures. The vertical divisions of each painting correspond to Bruckner's time segments. Ox analyzed the musical structure of the symphony as the basis of artwork that would successfully translate the composer's score and sound into a visual medium. To prepare the work, Ox executed numerous drawings from the score to create a visual translation using flexible but accurate equivalences that combine figurative and formal speculation. For Junod, Ox's methodic consistency combines formal rigor with conscious subjectivity. He states that Ox's approach represents the confluence of two distinct traditions in an original synthesis. The Saint Florian Abbey provides the thematic visual material of the paintings. This baroque architecture corresponds to the contrapuntal language that inspired Bruckner. The abbey itself was part of Bruckner's life. The painted images also include the nearby Alpine landscape, linked to the romantic nature of the composer's music. The formal correspondences in these paintings emerge from a personal system that transcribes tonal relationships through a precisely calculated analogy between the color wheel and the circle of fifths. While this process avoids a rigid correlation of color and pitch, the subtle play of color variations and values suggest each modulation by using carefully layered glazes. The effects of transparent glazing preserve the polyphonic dimension on the symphony, and the linear composition reflects rhythmic and melodic elements. Junod's description of the process used in the Bruckner paintings mirrors the work done for other painted series before and since. These include Debussy, ''Nuages'', Stravinsky, ''Symphony in Three Movements'', and

Clarence Barlow Clarence Barlow (also Klarenz, born 27 December 1945) is a composer of classical and electroacoustic works. Career Barlow was one of the founders of Initiative Musik und Informatik Köln. In 1988 he was the director of music at the Internatio ...

, ''Im Januar am Nil''. The Barlow music was visualized in The Virtual Color Organ. The Virtual Color Organ was created with Dave Britton in 1999. In 1993 Jack Ox discovered a recording of Kurt Schwitters himself performing the full Ursonate. A Dutch engineer apparently made the recording in the 1960s from an earlier recording once held in the archives of Westdeutsche Rundfunk. The original recording no longer exists and the precise date of the recording is unknown. Ernst Schwitters, the artist’s son, who granted permission for the recording firm Wergo to published the record, authenticated this unique recording of Schwitters. A tribunal in Cologne confirmed Schwitters’s authentication Ox has often been linked to the intermedia artists of the Fluxus group. Her work was included in the 1992 Fluxus Virus exhibition in Cologne and more recently to the Fluxus exhibition in Pori, Finland. Recently, Barbara Maria Stafford wrote:

Two remarkable websites of the artist Jack Ox, who works in the area of visualization and metaphor, situate us solidly and robustly within Kurt Schwitters's sonorous Ursonate (1922-1932), currently being presented in full stage-sound renditions by Ox and performance artist Kristen Loree. Recalling not only Merz productions but the collaborative, intermedial aims of
Fluxus Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus ...
and
Dick Higgins Dick Higgins (15 March 1938 – 25 October 1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement (and community). Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was an ...
's insistence on evanescent performance, the goal here, too, is creative renewal. This making of something audible and visible again has a fascinating relation to media art history. In the process of recuperation and re-enlivenment, Ox stumbled upon a long-lost recording of Schwitters performing the Ursonate. Up until then, no one knew how Schwitters actually performed the work. Ox's cross-domain work in computation, data visualization, and acoustics begins with encoding works of music that are then transformed into paintings. The largest and most important of such correlational projects is the planned full transcription of the 800-foot-long painting for the Digital Dome Theatre at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. http://intermediaprojects.org/pages/IntermediaProjectsPresentsUr.html Unlike the Modernist explorations of chance and discontinuity, fragment and fragmentation, this mode of intermedial knowing confers a revolutionary plenitude on the resulting work that is possible to experience but difficult to describe.

Originally trained in art at San Francisco Art Institute (BFA, 1969) and the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is t ...

(MFA, 1977) she studied musicology at the Manhattan School of Music and phonetics at the

University of Cologne The University of Cologne (german: Universität zu Köln) is a university in Cologne, Germany. It was established in the year 1388 and is one of the most prestigious and research intensive universities in Germany. It was the sixth university to ...

. In 2015, she earned her PhD at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Her thesis topic was conceptual metaphor theory and blending theory in science, design, and art. Ox is now Creative Director of Intermedia Projects, a non-profit art-science organization located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is also a Research Fellow at the

University of Texas, Dallas The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD or UT Dallas) is a public research university in Richardson, Texas. It is one of the largest public universities in the Dallas area and the northernmost institution of the University of Texas system. It wa ...

, Art-Sci Lab @ ATEC. She serves as an international co-editor of the art-science journal Leonardo from

The MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publish ...

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