The Warp Whistle Project (WWP) is an artistic cross-disciplinary collaboration between Mary Laube and composer Dr. Paul Schuette. They began working with each other in 2013 after meeting at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Their work merges the disciplines of music and visual art to produce new art forms such as kinetic paintings, sonic sculptural installations, and musical concerts accompanied by electronic stage sets.
Each WWP project explores the sound and look of error by collaging hand-made forms with integrated technologies to produce sound, motion, and light. The slippage and synchronization between the sonic and visual components of their work explores tensions between the hand-made and the mechanical, illusion and artifice, and function and futility. The work appears at first machinelike, referring to everyday objects such as clocks or metronomes. Over-time however, this relationship breaks down: the coordination of sound and motion falls away from predictable boundaries, and the seemingly purposeful action of the objects dissolves into the unknown.
Moonbeams and Satellites, single channel video, acrylic on MDF, 54 x 25.5 x 25.5 in., 2022
Aerial, exhibition at Tri-Star Arts, Knoxville TN
Moonbeams and Sattelittes is a single-channel video piece produced by filming a kinetic painting (acrylic, MDF, foam-board, LEDS, and electronics). The score/sound was composed by Paul Schuette and performed by the horn trio Kywylria. Projector house was constructed from MDF and acrylic.
Concert performance with the Network for New Music, 2018
Electronic stage set (plywood, foam-board, cardboard, spray paint, glitter, rhinestones, acrylic, LEDS, electronics),
The Navigator is a hybrid work of art: a staged collision of sonic and visual information. The visual components are inspired by Asa Smith’s 19th century astronomical illustrations: outdated planetary charts that served a didactic purpose for his readers. Additional source materials include 1950s science fiction stage sets, clock parts, and mythological scientific instruments. Tensions between the hand-made and the mechanical, illusion and artifice, and function and futility, positions The Navigator as an amalgamation of past representations of ideological futures. Similar to make-believe, the viewer is consumed by an experience on the verge of rupture.
As The Navigator performs its various functions, its true purpose remains enigmatic. While every journey has a destination, The Navigator’s priority is the voyage. In “Wind Up”, the music is energetic and intricate, influenced by strains of minimalism, yet the question of mechanical malfunction begins early on as kinks enter into the clockwork precision. “Unlock” is an hypnotic journey through nocturnal spaces - pointillistic starbursts of sound map a course out of the darkness and into the light. In the final leg, once a tenuous signal is established, The Navigator is ready to “Transmit” to its final destination.