Music-Kinetic Art Medium: On the Work of the Group ‘Prometei’ (SKB), Kazan, U.S.S.R.

The author describes the work of the Group ‘Prometei’ (SKB) at Kazan, U.S.S.R. on combining kinetic electric light art with music since the founding of the Group in 1962. Public performances have been given in which the motion and the colour of projected light images were manually controlled in an attempt to correlate them with either the individual qualities or the themes or with both of these aspects of music. The Group believes that the manual control of kinetic images to obtain such correlations offers more hope for this type of artistic medium than audio-kinetic art using electronic and electro-mechanical devices to control the correlations automatically.

Applications of the methods that they have devised in this domain for a proposed music-kinetic art concert hall and for outdoor spectacles of the Son et Lumière type are mentioned as well as future projects. The Group organizes periodic All-Soviet Union Conferences on ‘Light and Music’, the third having been held from 27 June to 4 July 1975 at Kazan.