Artist Profile

THE BIRTH OF MVSIC - Video Production Still
Digital Image

THE BIRTH OF MVSIC - Video Production Still
Digital Image

THE BIRTH OF MVSIC - Video Production Still
Digital Image

THE BIRTH OF MVSIC - Video Production Still
Digital Image

Robert Zott takes photographs of tombstones ... not your average tombstones. Each bears a single last name that is also a common English word. When describing his work, he cites Michelangelo who said, “The greatest artist has no single concept that a marble block does not contain already.” The New York Times has written, “Robert Zott’s surveying of graveyards to find tombstones with startlingly appropriate names on them is a fascinating and increasingly well-known obsession.”

Zott is also a computer music composer and theorist whose CD entitled "Sonic Simulations" (1990) was among the first to be generated and recorded entirely with digital technology. 34 years later, "THE BIRTH of MVSIC" (2024) is a short follow-up to this work. The audio was generated with a Commodore 64 and the visuals incorporate Photoshop Generative AI Technology. The room in which this "video storybook" takes place is located at Herrenchiemsee Palace in Bavaria. Built by Ludwig II in the late 19th century, it contains an empty music cabinet constructed by Franz Paul Stulberger. A vessel of intention, it is reimagined here as the metaphorical birthplace of music.

"Baroque architects concealed the underlying structural geometry of a space (its length, width, and height) to create a sense of cloud-like suspension. Sections of this work combine the structural geometries of pitch, amplitude, and duration -- blurring their divisions -- to achieve the same. This is music with a variable architecture, music in a primordial state, before cultural differentiation, cohesive in the relationship between the aforementioned parameters within each event, and thus decoupled from any relational constraints of tuning, temperament, or the structural functions of harmony." — Robert Zott

Tour Location: ArtSpace Hartford Studio

Website: www.robertzott.com

Click here to see the 25th Anniversary Video Retrospective produced by CT Public Broadcasting!