Mappaemundi (2001) Video
9:00
**a Program Notes . Mappaemundi is a 9-minute work for digital animation and computer-realized sound created by artist Sue Hettmansperger, composer Lawrence Fritts, and mathematician Walter Seaman. Like Medieval mappaemundi--maps that integrated geographical, spiritual, and emotional worlds--our Mappaemundi map or transpose interdisciplinary modes of understanding and communicating. Thus, visual images are treated like sounds, music becomes an extension of mathematical thought, and mathematics becomes a way of understanding artistic creation. The visual imagery of Mappaemundi is based on a series of paintings by Sue Hettmansperger that explores biological form in the human body and in the natural world. The artist digitally transformed and animated these images to create complex, evolving visual structures. These structures were combined with mathematically-generated images, creating a dialogue between the biological forms of nature and the mathematical structure that lies beneath. Similarly, the music of Mappaemundi traverses the physical world of sound and its abstract representation. The sounds in the work originated with a recording of a human body in an anechoic chamber. Breath and heartbeat were then digitally analyzed by the composer into discrete audio components. These fundamental units of sound were then recombined to create musical imagery that complements and extends the physical and emotional worlds evoked by the work's visual imagery. Music and image are also interconnected at the mathematical level, where color, form, spatial orientation, and movement interact with timbre, harmony, and rhythm to create complex, evolving geometrical, topological, and algebraic structures. **a Downloads:Quicktime Movie
