This exhibition at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art will present for the first time to the general public the works of musical composer, programmer, audiovisual artist and designer Milan Guštar, who utilizes mathematical principles in his musical compositions and audio, visual and intermedia installations. Most of the exhibited works, which had long existed as algorithms or processes in the form of notes and sketches, were (re)constructed by the artist for his first solo and at the same time retrospective show at the DOX Centre.

Since the 1980s, Guštar’s name has been appearing repeatedly within the context of independent film, theatre, the alternative music scene and later also the audio-visual art scene. His work on the one hand contains elements of strict logical thinking and a certain trace of mathematical dryness, but on the other hand it reveals a preoccupation with the world of the sensual, magical and eccentric.

The artist works at the interface between science, technology and art, and interconnects these areas using numerical relationships:

“The unifying element consists of numbers and mathematics, which is a distinctive, independent world of structures and relationships,” explains Guštar. “In mathematics, aesthetics is used as a measurement of quality. When several procedures exist, the more elegant one is better. Which links mathematics, which otherwise seems to be exact and austere, to art.” Abacus

The exhibition presents Guštar’s research on a foundation of logical, physical and metaphysical principles that is expressed using sounds and often also visual ideas. The exhibited works are primarily intellectual constructs, personal patents as it were, whose physical form is not their main essence. If the artist reveals the basic principle, he considers the work to be complete and its materialization is only verification of the expected. For this reason, the exhibition does not contain Guštar’s numerous electromechanical and electronic instruments, which he considers to be a mere prerequisite for the creative work itself and a means to this end.

“Structures that can be expressed via music or sound often also have an interesting visual representation. Thus via the graphical recording of music, I also arrived at visual things,” says Milan Guštar.

An example is the work entitled Abacus, expressed by musical notation, a sound recording, and transfer of the composition into graphical form, where each interval is represented by a different colour. In Primary Sound I, the artist deals with the relationship between sound waves and light waves.

The work entitled Summa Summarum is one of the few not accompanied by music. In it, the artist seeks parallels between abstract structures and real-world objects. It consists of a set of photographs, notes, his own scientific papers or visualized principles that the artist created or collected during his work. A total of 96 pictures form a mosaic connecting numerical relationships or free associations, and together create a hidden order.

Asklépion

“I like it when connections between things begin to appear, of which I had no prior knowledge and that were hidden there – then I have the feeling that I’m on the right track,” adds the artist.

Milan Guštar (*1963) concerns himself with interdisciplinary research on the frontier of science, technology and art, mathematical principles in music, tonal system theory, electro-acoustics and organology. He utilizes mathematical principles, microtonality and algorithmic procedures in his musical compositions and audio, visual and intermedia installations. Since 2010, he has been teaching at Prague’s FAMU and HAMU, where he works at the Musical Acoustics Research Centre.

The exhibition is open to the public at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art from 18 July to 14 October 2013.