Klangfarben · Manfred Mohr

bitforms gallery is pleased to announce the new work from Manfred Mohr in his third solo exhibition. The recent Klangfarben series explores high-chroma representations of a calculated geometric space against a black field. The exhibition features a computer with a dual screen-based display as well as works on paper and canvas. P-486r, a steel laserglyph from 1992, and plotter drawings from his 1997 Half Plane series are also part of the exhibit. The rules of geometry, logic, and mathematics are fundamental to the custom-authored algorithms that generate Mohr's artwork. His pieces have been based on the logical structure of cubes and hypercubes, including the lines, planes and relationships among them since 1973. klangfarben is a body of paintings and animations based on the 11-dimensional hypercube and uses diagonal paths as a compositional building block. Diagonal paths are all the combinatorial possibilities of connecting two opposite points through a hypercube network, passing through each dimension once. The reference to "klangfarben" refers to a composition technique of playing one musical note and constantly changing the instrument playing that note. Initially working in paint and traditional media, in 1968 Mohr turned to the Fortran programming language to write algorithms as a vehicle of formal precision. A pioneering visual artist, Manfred Mohr practiced computational techniques at a very early stage in new media arts genre development.