Melbourne artist Robin Fox brings his new fully immersive audio visual show to the Brisbane Powerhouse this Sunday as part of the IRL Digital Festival.
Since his time at university, Robin Fox has been experimenting with the relationship between the two elements of light and sound to create performances that have continued to excite audiences for over a decade.
By translating the soundwaves created by his experimental music into a laser-light spectacle, the audience can both hear and see exactly the same thing, the premise that lies behind the majority of Fox's work.
For Fox, the relationship he employs between audio and visual mediums is clear, however it sometimes takes a little time for others to fully grasp. “You know I struggle a lot explaining the concept of my shows because the method that I use is so simple that people don't even think of it,” Fox says. “People will ask 'how do you synchronise the music and the lights', and the answer is they're exactly the same thing.
“What interested me was this relationship between sound and geometry,” Fox continues. “Suddenly you could see the shape of the sound immediately and you could connect with it. The signal was exactly the same – it was making the shape and creating the sound. And there was this one second [I examined] where it looked absolutely amazing and then I spent the next ten years examining that second and exploding it out into a library of associations between sound and image.
“Initially I was touring shows with a screen for the visual component of the performance and then one day, quite by accident, I discovered lasers at this shitty, little, dance club in Melbourne. I'd gone there to do a noise gig and they had this single, green laser shooting shapes at the wall and I just loved it.
“And I thought, for my own shows, maybe I could turn the system around and shoot the sound at the audience rather than have them watching a screen. Because there was something a little bit passive about that two-dimensional experience and I felt if I made it three dimensional it would activate the space.”
Conscious of the public's general association of laser lights with either rave culture or a primary-school dance, Fox is careful when creating his pieces. “One of the hardest things when I'm making this work is to avoid the tackiness associated with lasers, and I have to consciously try not to make it so.
“It's easy to go tacky, it's fun - but I want it to be more than that,” he says. “I'm not so interested in making dancefloor tracks, I want to create a similar feeling to that chemical-induced sense of euphoria, but I want it to come from somewhere else. I want people to feel that sense of weightlessness and to come away feeling like they have seen something incredible.”
Touring nationally with his new 'RGB Laser Show', which incorporates three, different-coloured lasers placed around the performance space, Fox also has two, audio-visual films on display at the Griffith University Art Gallery under the group exhibition 'Elemental Phenomena', which he encourages those who are attending his weekend performance at the Brisbane Powerhouse to also view, in order to gain a greater understanding of his multi-faceted work, and the difference, he stresses, between his laser shows and other genres of audio-visual work. “The shows are as much about the architecture of the room as anything else because the light takes up the whole space, so the idea is you're standing within the sound.
“And all around you is the geometry of the sound. And then when, quite unconsciously, your brain makes that connection between the sound and the visual, you have what I call a mechanical synthetic experience; you're experiencing this idea that the sound and the image are exactly the same thing, which they are in essence. The signal that you hear is the signal that you see.”
As a performer who has been showcasing his art for over a decade, Fox is acutely aware of audience reactions to the often intense experiences his work provides. “As an artist I'm obviously looking for a positive reaction but I also know that with this medium that isn't something you're always going to get.
“You know, some people will come up to you and say 'that was like being on drugs' and others will absolutely hate it, but what I did find is that as I began to incorporate the visual link into the audio my audience began to grow and diversify – people who would normally walk out of a noise gig would stay for the visual spectacle.
“One of the most intense responses for me was after a gig in Canada and a guy came up to me and said he hadn't felt like he had during my show since he'd been under fire in Vietnam. And I thought shit, I don't know if that's good or bad.”
Robin Fox performs as part of the IRL Digital Festival at Brisbane Powerhouse 10 May.
