Logos III



2011


For Video and electronics

Duration: 7 minutes

Notes: Collaboration with Luigi Balleri.

TERZO LOGOS (THIRD LOGOS)
Terzo Logos is a conceptual work and a magic rite.
The central point of the entire project is a hymn to Mitra, an Indo-Iranian divinity mostly identified with the God of Sun. Mitra’s liturgy is contained in the Magical Codex of Paris, an Ancient Greek collection of different antique liturgies. This prayer, called Third Logos, is formed by the seven Greek vowels and it presents itself like a mantra:

Èeò oèeò iòò oè èeò èeò iòò oèèe oèe ooè iè èò oòoè
ieo oè òoe ièò oè ieeò eè iòoè ioè oèò eoè oeò oiè oiè
eò oi iii èoè oyè èòoèe eòèia aeaeèa èeeè eeè eeè ieò
eèò oèeeoè èeò eyò oe eiò èò òè òè ee ooo yi òè.

Our aim was to give a new reading of this Hymn through images and sounds. To achieve this goal, the visual artist Luigi Balleri decided to make a documentary video of himself burning his first work: a symbol of sun composed of electronic trash material.
In the meanwhile we associated to each letter, blank space and punctuation mark a sample token from the video (e.g. sounds of fire) or recorded in studio (flute notes, breaths, tam-tam hit, water bottles sounds, violin tremolo, diapason). To every sound we add a frequency obtained from the ancient Greek alphabetic musical notation and corresponding to the note indicated by each vowel. Then, we found a formula to link the frequencies of every letter with values of duration, attack and decay. In this way we created an electronic mantra of one minute, which has this hymn as fundament, not only for its rhythm, but also for each parameter.
The video part respects the same principle: we cut the video in sequences and we classified them in groups according to colours, point of view, and different moment of the burning object. Every group was associated to a letter with a duration obtained from the same formula that we used for the music but seven times slower. In fact, while the video part reads only once the magic formula in seven minutes, the music repeats seven times its one-minute cycle, creating a hidden relation between the video and the music without synchronies, but with the same fundamental rule, generating two cycles that moves at the same time with different speed.
According to the magical text, only after seven repetitions of the mantra, marked by a tam-tam hit, the faithful could evoke the God.

Exhibition: 26.5.2011 Flucht Punkte, Graz.




Lorenzo Romano Composer

lorromano@yahoo.it
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