Piano Sculpture

Acknowledged as one of the pioneers of new media arts with his practice encompassing installations and performances that employ music, video, painting and sculpture, Michael Snow made experiments to uncover the sculptural qualities of sound and express the sonic qualities of a moving image or a painting. He often described his endeavours openly, stating that he made his paintings as a filmmaker, his films as a painter, and his musical pieces as a sculptor, by bringing together various sensory experiences from different disciplines of art.

Snow’s "Piano Sculpture", a video installation with four video projections on the walls of a room, depicts the artist’s hands playing on the keyboards. For each piano, the covers over the strings are open, rendering it possible to see a hammer striking a string each time a key is hit by the artist. Each projection has sound, though they are not in sync with the movements of the hands on the keyboards seen on the projections. In the room, the four speakers each presenting a different piano solo, together with the performance of the hands and the pianos, make for a cacophonic piano quartet for the audience. "Piano Sculpture" is one of the pieces in which Snow pursues a transmedium aesthetic experiment of production and presentation, suggesting a spatial, performative and visual experimental piano quartet.