Dirty Light - Marko Ciciliani

presented a colour organ in public. Alexander Burnett Hector (1866-1956) patented another
colour organ in 1908, and shortly thereafter the pianist Mary Hallock-Greenewalt (1870-
1951) patented her version of this instrument.
In 1912 Rimington published the book A New Art - Colour Music. He also developed a
colour organ with which he accompanied Alexander Scriabin’s (1872-1915) composition
Prométhée. Around the 1930s the group Les Musicalistes emerged in Paris. They created
paintings in analogies to specific musical compositions and propagated a fusion and
musicalisation of all arts. One of their members, the Swiss artist Charles Blanc-Gatti (1890-
1966) published a book titled Sons et Couleurs in 1932. There he wrote:
Today there are no longer any borders, and instead one great interconnected whole,
meaning that energy and material are one and the same thing. Only yesterday we
cried: Sound is energy; pigment colour is matter. But now, if we ignore the chemical
composition (in which the molecules are systems or small worlds) of the colour
masses used in painting, they are the equivalents of energy in the form of light. They
shatter our visual senses just as sound shatters our sense of hearing. As regards
coloured light, as projected light it is no longer matter but energy.
The idea of amalgamating art forms was also pursued in the Bauhaus and Dada movements,
most notably by the Austrian Dadaist Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971), who patented a colour
projector, the Optophon in 1926. In his Manifesto “Die überzüchteten Künste”, Hausmann
wrote in 1933:
Gentlemen Musicians and Painters, you will see through your ears and hear through
your eyes!
At the Bauhaus Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack (1893-1965), Josef Hartwig (1880-1956) and Kurt
Schwerdtfeger (1897-1966) worked with elements of movement, rhythm and relationships
between musical and coloured forms. They used them in an effort to create real movement in
space and time. They expanded the concept of the light organ to large-scale images and stagesets.
58 Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack produced Farbsonatine in 1925, where variations of
intensities of light-sources in different colours and with varying stencils were arranged.
58 Weibel, Peter: “The Development of Light Art”, in: Light Art from artificial Light, ZKM/Hatje Cantz (2005),
161.
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