MSUM professor’s work combines music, digital images

Well, there’s no time like the present, and that point is punctuated by the stacks of boxes, guitar, impressive stereo equipment and general disarray of his office as Gwiazda prepares to move out of his office and out of town.

At the end of this semester, Gwiazda will pull up stakes and move to California, where he will finish out his tenure teaching his students remotely via video conferencing. All of this adds up to a fitting introduction to his work, since the timing of our experiences, their manipulation in the digital world, and transitions to new phases all sit at the root of it.

In addition to his robust career as an academic and composer, Gwiazda has made a significant mark internationally over the past two decades as a video artist, prompting scholarly review and awards from festivals in Italy, Poland and Germany. His work has been reviewed in the Village Voice and the New York Times.

As a composer, he gained recognition for work with a piece of software called Virtual Audio, which allowed him to move sound spatially using a stereo speaker set up to create three-dimensional sound. In 1996, Innova Recordings released a CD of this work, “noTnoTesnoTrhyThms,” which began to feed into an interest in virtual reality and the digital world.

“I fell in love with the digital. I’d already fallen in love with the sound of the digital, so I thought about it for about a year, and then decided to expand my work into the visual,” Gwiazda says. “That was quite a leap for me because I’d always conceptualized myself as a composer. But it was one of the best decisions, artistically, I ever made.”

Around 2001, he began to transition fully into the video work he’s doing today: short videos that bring the sequencing of time from musical composition into a visual, digital universe oriented around the influence on a viewer’s attention. A new set of this work is on display at Anchor Projects, an online contemporary art initiative.

While it doesn’t fit popular or commercial notions of music, Gwiazda says it still retains a lot of the concepts from musical composition, particularly sequencing and pacing.

“There are a number of things that interest me, like the sequencing of events in time in our life,” Gwiazda says.

Curator Jeelan Bilal-Gore, writing on the Anchor Projects website, calls this digital examination of everyday life “deeply philosophical.”

“The analysis and presentation of phenomena, and the transfer of attention from one phenomenon to another in an unexpected temporal flow, create the conditions to become more aware of and examine one’s subjective perception,” Bilal-Gore writes.

In one video, “Choice,” the viewer is greeted with a nondescript character in a nondescript city setting. The only descriptive visual we’re given is a sign that reads “Old Style BBQ.” Then, the word “here” begins to appear, drawing our attention to slight shifts in the character’s posture, or the addition of other, equally nondescript characters.

There’s no narrative to speak of, and Gwiazda says that’s not the point.

“I’m trying to create an artform that is not just sound, vision or words, but rests on the connection between a light coming on, some words, and then a character moving. That’s all part of an artistic phrase,” he says.

Gwiazda hopes his final year in teaching will yield new possibilities for his students. He’s thinking of trying to remotely teach his pop/rock class from Los Angeles’ Whisky A Go-Go, or bringing in a friend who was an engineer for The Doors, ideas that add another layer to the combination of timing and experience present in the digital world that has become the backbone of his work.

“Any time an artist uses a medium, they have to have a close relationship to it,” he says.

This article is part of a content partnership with The Arts Partnership, a nonprofit organization cultivating the arts in Fargo, Moorhead and West Fargo, and its online publication, ARTSpulse. For more information, visit http://theartspartnership.net/artspulse.