Pophausen Artwork

Massimo Magee is a writer, artist and musician based in London. He is the author of Manifesto (New Unities), a manifesto for his audiovisual digital art practice, published in 2017, the limited edition multimedia novel The Triptych, and a new audiovisual novel forthcoming from Eleusinian Press. He has been active in experimental and avant garde music for over a decade, and records for New York based 577 Records. In audiovisual art, his practice focuses on the creation of audiovisual digital art objects, each one designed to be read by the computer as both a visual still image and as a piece of audio, these being two readings of the same file in each case. The work draws equally on the twin lineages of abstract image making (particularly abstract expressionist painting) and experimental music, including avant garde classical and free jazz. This practice proposes an entirely new and thoroughly modern form of art in that it posits art objects that can only truly been 'seen' in their original state by the machine: while human observers require the audio and visual readings of the file to be separated out in order to perceive them, the computer sees both audio and visual aspects enmeshed within and between each other in the one file. In this way, the pieces examine the gulf between organic and electronic perception.