Vibrant circles pulse across the screen, emanating from nowhere in psychedelic colours and speeds, then drifting hypnotically into the distance, suddenly replaced by another series of circles spinning as though in orbit. It’s an animation, but not as we know it. Read more: The best Google Doodles celebrating tech, science and culture
Made in 1938 by Oskar Fischinger, An Optical Poem saw the filmmaker hang hundreds of paper shapes on invisible wires, shooting and then stitching together single frames to mirror, in painstaking detail, the rhythm of Franz Liszt's 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody.
The stop-motion film was a work of love. “To most of us music suggests definite mental images of form and colour,” a notice before the film starts, tells us. “The picture you are about to see is a novel scientific experiment – its object is to convey these mental images in visual form.”
Frankfurt-born Oskar Fischinger is the subject of today’s Google Doodle, to commemorate what would have been the pioneering artist’s 117th birthday. Fast-forward almost 90 years from An Optical Poem, and Fischinger’s visual symphony is a lot easier to recreate.
The Doodle allows you to plot a piece of music by moving your cursor across an invisible grid and hitting the mouse to decide on the location of your note. The music plays from the left-hand side of the screen to the right, picking up and playing your notes as an invisible hand passes over them. You can choose between four different shapes, that signify different notes. When each one is struck, it proceeds to fly out of the screen in much the same way as one of Oskar Fischinger’s stop-motion paper shapes. The effect is satisfying, beautiful, and somehow, regardless of how many notes you chuck on, still a pleasant piece of music.
Still, the amateur artistry falls far short of the animator’s own abstract visions. Oskar Fischinger would hand draw, paint and photograph to create his films, spending many months and sometimes even years on them.
The creations would be shown in cinemas alongside news items in the 1930s; some were even used to advertise classical music and could be considered as the first music videos. He soon had to leave Germany, however, after the Nazis classed his work as “degenerate art” and refused him permission to work. By this time, his work had caught the eye of an agent from Paramount Pictures, and the filmmaker relocated to the US to continue his work, animating part of Disney’s seminal Fantasia (he quit after the studio changed his work to move away from the abstract end of the spectrum into realism). He went on to work at MGM.
He created a device specifically to advance his art in the late 1940s: the Lumigraph. It created beams of coloured light, with one individual manipulating a screen to change the shapes and another changing the colours. The contraption went on to be used in a 1964 sci-fi film, The Time Travellers.
To celebrate the Doodle, Google spoke with Oskar Fischinger’s daughter Angie, who described her father’s unique talent in turbulent times: “My father was incredibly dedicated to his art — some even called him stubborn. His passion and honesty were part of his brilliance, but they could also make him a bit difficult to work with. Sometimes our family struggled financially as a result, so everybody pitched in — the kids got paper routes or did babysitting. We were raised in a healthy, hard-working environment. We were happy, intellectually stimulated, and dedicated to education.
“I feel incredibly proud of my family and am delighted to be the daughter of Oskar and Elfriede Fischinger. It means so much to me to see this celebration of my father's art. It’s wonderful to know that his work, which has been steadily praised since the 1920s, will continue to receive worldwide recognition.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
