(Please be warned this video artwork contains flashing images.)
Robin Fox’s digital version of his work Magnetic Trap, 2012, uses ‘tune data’ taken from the beam displacement of the Australian Synchrotron. The latter is a 3 GeV synchrotron radiation facility in Melbourne, Australia, and is a light source facility that uses particle accelerators to produce a beam of high energy electrons in order to create synchrotron light. Fox fed the sound into a ‘Synchronator’ device, which takes three channels of sound and converts the sound into 3 channels of video information. The intensity of the sounds correlate with the intensities of colour, and the frequencies of the sounds determine how each colour channel scans.
Fox used the Australian Synchrotron’s tune data to seed random number generators, and to provide frequency changes and rhythmic flow for sections of the work. Instead of literally translating the tune data Magnetic Trap is an aesthetic interpretation of the x and y read out of the Synchrotron's beam displacement, interspersed with free-form electronic noise.
The original version of Magnetic Trap can be found in the Australian Synchrotron Collection.
Fox lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.
