Each week we pay homage to a select "Original Creator"—an iconic artist from days gone by whose work influences and informs today's creators. These are artists who were innovative and revolutionary in their fields—bold visionaries and radicals, groundbreaking frontiersmen and women who inspired and informed culture as we know it today. This week: Oskar Fischinger.Music and visuals belong together—it’s a pairing that’s as universal as peanut butter and jelly or root beer and vanilla ice cream. With new innovations in technology, audio visualizations are evolving from the music video to large, site-specific projections live shows. Though visual music may seem like a recent phenomenon, its history goes back much further than you would think—enter Oskar Fischinger, an early 20th century animator who specialized in avant-garde, audiovisual films. Fischinger avoided portraying the representational in his work and embraced the abstract, moving in a completely different direction than any other animator at the time.
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Born on June 22, 1900, Fischinger grew up in Germany where he indulged in his passion for art and music through painting and violin lessons. Once he finished school at the age of 14, Fischinger started to work at an organ-building firm to learn the theoretical physics of music. However, he abandoned his musical career when his family encountered financial strain. Instead, he entered trade school and became an engineer at a manufacturing factory. However, this didn’t deter him from pursuing his artistic interests—once he obtained his diploma, he started to pursue a full-time film career.Raumlichtkunst (1926-2012).
While pursuing his career in film by completing commercial projects, Fischinger would simultaneously work on abstract personal projects. He created Studies while he was working on special effects for the German, sci-fi feature, Woman in the Moon. Studies is a series of abstract short films that feature black and white forms that are synchronized to music. A few of the early Studies were synchronized to new record releases by Berlin-based record label Electrola and screened at theaters, making them the very first music videos. These short films were wildly successful— the demand for them was so high that Fischinger created 16 Studies in four years. Listen to an excerpt from Studie nr. 8 above.
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