Farewell Prometheus Readings: Light-Music in the Former Soviet Union

tual reality and interface design. Intuitively , we know there is a lot more than just a linear reading of words to get information . We don't understand it and don't have languages for it yet. It's surprising how little research has focused on the language of the body, which can convey so much more than any words. BB: One of our UCLA graduate students took a camera and started off across the street from a bus stop. When one student came to wait for the bus, he stood right there in the center; another student came and they almost divided the space equally. The more people came-every time someone came to this bus stop, they were equally spacing themselves. And from a bird'seye view, the people who came would always automatically space themselves. He did a visual essay on different places where people put themselves like that, where he could document it ... and it was like how Fred Astaire has this little tap ... It was a graphic pattern. RA: And then you find that in different cultures people space themselves differently ... Acknowledgments Thanks to Aline Bicheret for taping and transcribing this discussion and to UCLA Extension for sponsoring the roundtable. Farewell Prometheus Readings: Light-Music in the Former Soviet Union Bulat M. Galeyev For 25 years, seminars, conferences and festivals centering around "light-music "-an art form that integrates musical composition and the creative use of light-were held in Kazan, drawing participants from the entire former Soviet Union. In the 1980s, these conferences were named "Prometheus Readings" after Scriabin's Prometheus, an influential score that united light and music. The jubilee tenth anniversary of the Prometheus Readings convened in April 1992, with "Light-Music in the Theater" as its theme. As usual, representatives from the entire Soviet Union planned to attend, so when the Union disintegrated the convention became an international one. Several early syntheses of light and music in onstage performance-RimskyKorsakov 's Mlada, Kandinsky's Yellow Lightand Schoenberg's LuckyHandwere discussed. Reports were given on Barranov-Rossine's experiments with optophony (a term he coined to refer to light-music), which he performed in the 1920s in the Bolshoi Theater and in V. Meyerkhold's theater. The use of music scenography in the chamber theater of A. Tairov was discussed. Among the reports on modern experiments were discussions of "laseriums"-modern light-musical performances held under the "sky"of planetariums-and of a new theater company called "Lanterna Magica." A concert program featured lightmusicians from Kharkov, laser experiments conducted by Kazaners and audiovisual compositions based on investigations that originated in the former electronic music studio at the Scriabin Museum in Moscow. There was also a video presentation featuring the work of foreign colleagues active in the arts, sciences and technology. The Prometheus studio in Kazan, organizer of the Readings, announced that it would no longer be possible to hold the conventions on a free-ofcharge basis; thus, the 1992 convention was both a jubilee and a farewell. During the final years of the Prometheus Readings, the scope of the conferences had expanded beyond light music to include other forms of experimental art. Artists, producers, cinematographers and engineers from many towns in the former USSR took part in conferences. Academic specialists in aesthetics and the psychology of art presented papers, while artists presented light-musical works including films, electronic music, kinetic art, computer animation, light architecture, laser art, holography and spatial music -in short, any modern genre involving art, science and technology fell within the range of the Readings. Perhaps the end of the Prometheus Readings also marks the end of a fierce and desperate 30-year process of establishing a postwar Soviet school of modern art. Beginning with the "thaw" after Stalin's death, this process was initiated in hopes of continuing and developing the creativity of the pre- and early postrevolutionary years, reviving the work of artists such as Scriabin, Ciurlionis, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Theremin and Eisenstein. In the 1960s, a number of creative groups with "synthetic" agenda swept in on the wave of social reform, such as the Color-Music group at the Scientific Research Institute ofAutomatics and Telemechanics of the USSR...