Interview with Aura Satz

21/01/16
Interview: Aura Satz

When she was pregnant with her daughter in 2003, the London-based artist Aura Satz (b1974, Barcelona) used her belly as the antenna for a bespoke theremin – a musical instrument that is played by proximity and hand gestures. She was already a performance artist and sculptor, but this new performance piece awakened Satz’s interest in sound and the correlation – or, more often, mismatch – between sound and vision. Since then, and increasingly through the medium of film, Satz has been exploring acoustics, vibration, sound visualisation and musical gesture. Another strand to her work focuses on gender and women’s (often unseen) contributions to technology. Many of her works combine the two, with months of research and complex backstories, which often remain largely unappreciated by her audience. 

With a retrospective drawing to a close at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, and a new exhibition opening in Dallas, Satz invited Studio International to her studio to take a look at her work on screen and to hear about some of these thrilling and enthralling footnotes.

Read the interview here

Review of Aura Satz: Colour Opponent Process at Paradise Row

16/11/13

Aura Satz: Colour Opponent Process

Paradise Row

1 November – 6 December 2013

When colour film technology began to be developed around the turn of the 20^th century, filmic representation of the world took on a whole new appearance. Early filmmakers employed a laborious method of hand-colouring black-and-white film, and Pathé Color adapted this method using stencils. In 1916, in the United States, Max Handschiegl and Alvin Wyckoff created a dye-transfer equivalent of this stencil process, known as the Handschiegl Color Process, which was first used in the film Joan the Woman (1917), directed by Cecil B. DeMille.

The invention of Technicolor in 1916 was a pivotal moment in cinematographic history, and it became the most widely used colour process in Hollywood between 1922-1952, bringing to life many well-loved films, such as The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Invented by a trio of men – Herbert Kalmus, Daniel Frost Comstock and W. Burton Westcott – what is less often credited is the key role that Kalmus’s wife Natalie had to play in her job as colour consultant. Working with her theory of ‘colour consciousness’, she would draw up colour scores for films as if they were music. Women were behind the success of the hand stencilling process too, with over 400 female employees working at Pathé’s Vincennes factory by 1910. 

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2013/11/colour-opponent-process-2/