Steve's Audio-Visual Work

WEST VALLEY ART MUSEUM (Surprise, AZ) Photo by Jerry Cook

Art and life duo Steve Kornicki (video artist, composer) and Melissa Kornicki (graphic designer, photographer) create audio-visual explorations leading audiences on journeys of creativity, cognition and contemplation through the synchronous and interlocking use of music and video. The combination of video and sound represents the artists’ vision of two disciplines forming a singular, conceptual whole. Their experimental, non-narrative visual conceptualizations depict the transformation and manipulation of everyday objects, processes and occurrences. Steve’s accompanying music is created from the digital transformation and deconstruction of familiar orchestral and instrumental sounds. Their pieces, on both visual and auditory levels, alternate between what we perceive as reality and the realm of abstraction.

Steve has been composing concert and electronic music for over 20 years and his video work translates his extensive experience with sound into visual forms. Melissa has been involved with the graphic arts and digital media since her first experience in high school creating animations on one of the first Amiga computers. Her artistic talents along with her photography and extensive technical experience are crucial aspects to the realization of the duo's abstract video pieces.

The duo’s visionary video and audio art has been featured at presentations and installations across the United States including New York City, Arizona and multiple galleries in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as well as the online Perpetual Art Machine Gallery. In addition to their formal artistic work, they have been involved in commercial graphics, music and media.

Video Exhibition, Installation, Gallery Credits (scroll down for details and excerpts of individual pieces)
NEW AMERICAN ART UNION ( Portland , OR ) – Mixed Signals (Video Symphony) - BYOTV exhibition (presented by the Video Gentlemen) – Spring 2008
WEST VALLEY ART MUSEUM (Surprise, AZ) – Transfigurations #3 – An Affair with the Arts – March 2008
KELLY STRAYHORN THEATER ( Pittsburgh , PA ) – Video Distortion #1, Transfigurations #2 & Altered Orchestra (liquid video) - presented as part of Life in Balance multi-media performance – August 2007
MUSEUM FOR POLYDIMENSIONAL RESEARCH ( Tucson , AZ ) – Altered Orchestra (liquid video) - presented as part of the Flash Flood International Video Art Festival – August 2007
UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH OF NEW YORK ( Manhattan , NYC) – Altered Orchestra (liquid video) - TRANSreveLATION, an audio visual concert that explored form and structure – April 2007
SWEETWATER CENTER FOR THE ARTS ( Pittsburgh , PA ) – Transfigurations #1 - month-long “New Space” exhibition – January 2006
ART SPACE 303 ( Pittsburgh , PA ) - Transfigurations #1 - month-long “Collective Dreaming” exhibition – February 2006
DOWES ON 9TH STREET (Pittsburgh, PA) - Transfigurations #1 - art exhibition – March 2006

ARTIST STATEMENT
Visual and auditory transformation and metamorphosis is the subject of our work. Everyday sights and sounds are treated as new forms and are a constant in our audio-visual pieces. These forms can be large scale, gradually evolving temporal structures or short, fleeting juxtapositions of the chosen materials. Contrasts range from maximum sensory impact works to studies in slowly evolving, environmental states. Audio and visual textural densities supply us with the means to present a dynamic range within the presentations. Continuity is achieved through the paralleling and corresponding convergence of our two chosen mediums that can objectively be viewed as forming a singular, conceptual whole.

New perspectives and altered perceptions of sight and sound form the basis of what we communicate and translate to our audiences. Video allows us to represent a television screen or a flower as a completely new object through time-based manipulation and distortion of the selected images. In the same regard, audio transformations represent a bending, stretching or shifting of sound waves and frequencies. A powerful intellectual and emotional impact occurs in the viewer/listener/participant of our pieces through the multi-sensory aspect of these new unseen and unheard worlds. It can be an engrossing, almost mesmerizing and hypnotic experience where the temporal field is suspended and an almost altered consciousness state occurs. The experience can also take the shape of a relaxed or meditative state where the work serves to enhance the surrounding ambience.

Our goal is to capture essences of life and bring new meaning to their form and structure. We seek a timeless quality in our work where memory, imagination, inventiveness, cognition and contemplation all coalesce to achieve an experience of art that transcends our own cerebral boundaries.

Read Steve's video art essay on EcologicalArt.net.

"Your work ["Video Triptych" DVD] transported me to the world of fractals (which have been always part of my own work). Each video is mesmerizing!" - Nohra Corredor, Artist

Music: Altered Orchestra #3, for processed orchestra samples (Steve Kornicki)
Orchestra samples: Extracted from Steve Kornicki's "Morning Star Rising", originally performed by the Kiev Philharmonic
Original duration: 17 minutes, 31 seconds

Analogous to a four-movement symphony, this piece consists of four sections of varying musical and visual material. Everyday television content and familiar orchestral sounds are distorted, transformed and layered into a seamless collage creating a mesmerizing experience. The subject of the visualizations is a television screen filmed using close camera zooms through textured and colored glass which reveals an as of yet unseen landscape of refracted light, filtered color and kaleidoscopic patterns. Aside from visual cross-fades, stacking of video clips and looping techniques, the video is presented as it was filmed. The continuum of overlapping video and audio textures represents the constant presence of energy (television signals, recorded sounds) and the incessant barrage of media and its impact on our senses.

Altered Orchestra (liquid video) (2006-07)
digitally manipulated video of television filmed through a glass of water filled with small, floating particles

Music: Altered Orchestra #1, for processed orchestra samples (Steve Kornicki)
Orchestra samples: Extracted from Steve Kornicki's "Morning Star Rising", originally performed by the Kiev Philharmonic
Original duration: 9 minutes, 11 seconds

A composition based on the mathematical principle of "self-similar" objects. A self-similar object is exactly or approximately similar to a part of itself (e.g., the whole has the same shape as one or more of the parts). Many objects in the real world, such as coastlines, are statistically self-similar: parts of them show the same statistical properties at many scales. The visual and musical material of the piece consists of many instances of the same material overlapping in continually transforming ways creating new textural combinations, thus relating to the concept of self-similar objects.

- Presented at Life in Balance concert, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Pittsburgh, PA, August 2007

- Presented as part of the Flash Flood International Video Art Festival, Museum for Polydimensional Research, Tucson, AZ, August 4, 2007

- Premiered at TRANSreveLATION, an audiovisual concert that explored form and structure in April 2007 at the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of New York in mid-town Manhattan.

Transfigurations #2 (2006-07)
digitally manipulated photographs of flowers and plants presented as multi-layered video

Music: Altered Orchestra #4, for processed orchestra samples (Steve Kornicki)
Orchestra samples: Extracted from Steve Kornicki's "Morning Star Rising", originally performed by the Kiev Philharmonic
Original duration: 24 minutes, 7 seconds

A meditative piece and the second in a series concerned with the transformation of still-life, natural objects. Initially, the photographs appear indiscernible and heavily distorted, and gradually, over the work’s 22 minutes, some of the images’ original characteristics are revealed. Multiple layers of the photographs with motion effects create dream-like patterns of color and morphing structures that have their source in organic and natural phenomena.

- Presented at Life in Balance concert, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Pittsburgh, PA, August 2007

Video Distortion #1 (2007)
digitally manipulated video of television filmed through textured and stained glass

Music: Music for Altered Instruments #2 "Bass Guitar", for processed bass guitar samples (Steve Kornicki)
Bass Guitar samples: Steve Kornicki
Original duration: 4 minutes, 58 seconds

The piece derives its title from the digital manipulation of a previous video piece by Steve and Melissa Kornicki, “MIXED SIGNALS”. In this earlier 17-minute composition, the subject of the visualizations is a television screen filmed using close camera zooms through textured and colored glass. VIDEO DISTORTION #1 was created by accelerating the speed of the MIXED SIGNALS video clip to fit within a 5-minute time frame and then digitally manipulating and layering the final video.

- Presented at Life in Balance concert, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Pittsburgh, PA, August 2007

Transfigurations (2005)
digitally manipulated photographs of landscapes and natural phenomena presented as multi-layered video

Music: 61 X 5, for processed instrument samples (Steve Kornicki)

A flowing, 50-minute exploration in slow-motion video and the first in a series concerned with the transformation of still-life, natural objects. In the first half of the piece, black and white photographs transition to digitally transformed and manipulations versions of the photos. The video's second half consists of the same process with color photos. Gradually, the photos become completely obscured, and the piece concludes with transfigured images of the original photos from the previous sections.

Click here to see an excerpt and purchase from FilmBaby.com.

- Soundtrack for Transfigurations was included in the "most significant releases of 2006" list by WXPN-FM's ambient music radio program, Star's End.

- "New Space" - Sweetwater Center for the Arts - 2006 - installation/exhibition (Sewickley, PA)

- "Collective Dreaming" - ArtSpace 303 - 2006 - installation/exhibition (Homestead, PA)

- Dowe's on 9th Street (jazz club) - 2006 - exhibition (Pittsburgh, PA)

Transfigurations is available on DVD through FilmBaby.com