Round Evening - Limited Edition of 1 Artwork

Round Evening is the fifth part of Massimo Magee's series of seven works made in 2019, a crucial year for his practice. These seven works are audiovisual digital art pieces, 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, and point to the transcendental possibilities of the avant garde through technology. Magee explains this practice further in his Manifesto (New Unities) published in 2017. Round Evening contains the sound of Magee's live saxophone playing, alongside electronic sounds. The piece is presented as a unique, one-off print onto aluminium dibond, along with a CD documenting the audio readings of the full sequence of seven pieces.