Last Thursday, I made the all-too-rare trek uptown to the Guggenheim Museum for a collaborative performance by the visual artist Danny Perez, and the art-inflected experimental indie band, Animal Collective. Entitled Transverse Temporal Gyrus, the temporary installation transformed the museum's iconic inner-rotunda by Frank Lloyd Wright into a psychedelic dreamscape of light and sound. Upon entering the museum, I immediately noticed a set of glowing stalagtites surrounded by three large scale, mask-wearing, Gaga-esque, perverse versions of the Mickey Mouse conductor in Fantasia (presumably the artists in desguise).
Guests milled about on the ground floor, and around the bars interspersed throughout the museum; they wandered up and down the giant corkscrew and hung over the (scarily low) guardrails to take in the projections, which were at times abstract sine waves and other times reminiscent of surging water (I got a distinct Minority Report vibe from the visuals). The video element was intricately timed to correspond with strange, otherworldly sounds that seemed to be issuing from a sci-fi forest (one couldn't help but think of another audiovisual smorgasborg of recent memory, Avatar). That correspondence between the projected imagery and eerie, non-musical audio was the most fascinating aspect of the installation, and brought to mind a sort of computer programmed synesthaestia (check out the byzantine on-screen flowcharts, which I managed to sneak a shot of backstage, and seem to lay out the complex interrelations of audio and video). More pics and some video from the performance are provided here, and a special bonus video from Norman McLaren, one of the original pioneers of sound-image studies.
