The Seer

The Seer

VISIONS OF LEONARDO

A multimedia project for a solo performer and video images
by

Andrea Centazzo

For the 500th Anniversary of the death

“Leonardo da Vinci was like a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the others were all still asleep”
Sigmund Freud 

There has never been an artist who was more fittingly, and without qualification, described as a Genius.
Neither artist nor scientist remained unaffected by his genius and artistry: Leonardo was for centuries (and still is) one of the main inspiration for painters, musicians, scientists, and literates.
Some scholar theorized that he was a seer, envisioning the future as no contemporaries could do. Certainly Leonardo capacity to imagine 500 years ago things that just last century were born, looks like something supernatural.
After being inspired by subject of Gravitational Waves in the eve of their first detection, I found in this subject new lymph for my multimedia concept.
This multimedia show is meant to be homage at one of the greatest geniuses of the mankind through a blend of images created upon his drawing and painting mixed with shots from Tuscany, Renaissance artifacts and fictional scenes.
The music while retaining his contemporary flavor is widely open to all influences, namely the Renaissance music here presented in samples and re-orchestrations thank the use of the computer core of the compositional and performing process.

Father of the flight
Until the nineteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci was generally known only as a painter. Little or nothing of his sculpture or engineering works survived, and his notebooks, the only surviving evidence of his insatiable curiosity and fertile mind regarding science and technology, were long hidden away, dispersed in private hands.  It was only after 1800 that the record of his intellectual and technical accomplishments, the thousands of pages of writings and drawings that we collectively refer to today as Leonardo’s codices, began to surface, be studied, and published.  With the rediscovery of the Leonardo codices, the artist who painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper was recast as the Renaissance visionary who saw the modern world before it was realized.
Among the many subjects Leonardo studied, the possibility of human mechanical flight held particular fascination.  He produced more than 35,000 words and 500 sketches dealing with flying machines, the nature of air, and bird flight.These investigations of flight are scattered throughout the many da Vinci codices and manuscript collections, but he did produce one short codex almost entirely on the subject in 1505-1506, the Codice sul volo degli uccelli (Codex on the Flight of Birds).
Leonardo’s interest in flight appears to have stemmed from his extensive work on military technology which he performed in the employ of the Milanese court. He filled many notebooks with countless sketches of weapons, military machines, and fortifications.  They included a giant crossbow, a tank, and a submarine, to name just a few. However, as far as it is known, none of these inventions were ever built. Leonardo’s focus on military technology and tactics lead him to the idea of aerial reconnaissance. Once engaged with the notion of a flying machine, it became an obsession.
Given his close observance and use of nature as a foundation for many of his ideas, emulating natural flight was an obvious place to begin. Most of Leonardo’s aeronautical designs were ornithopters, machines that employed flapping wings to generate both lift and propulsion. In the Codex, da Vinci discusses the crucial concept of the relationship between the center of gravity and the center of lifting pressure on a bird’s wing. He explains the behavior of birds as they ascend against the wind, foreshadowing the modern concept of a stall. He demonstrates a rudimentary understanding of the relationship between a curved wing section and lift. He grasps the concept of air as a fluid, a foundation of the science of aerodynamics. Leonardo makes insightful observations of gliding flight by birds and the way in which they balance themselves with their wings and tail, just as the Wright brothers would do as they evolved their first aeronautical designs. He comments on the pilot’s position in a potential flying machine and how control could be achieved by shifting the body weight, precisely as the early glider pioneers of the late nineteenth century would do. He notes the importance of lightweight structures that aircraft would require. He even hints at the force Newton would later define as gravity.
Centuries before any real progress toward a practical flying machine was achieved, the seeds of the ideas that would lead to humans spreading their wings germinated in the mind of da Vinci. In aeronautics, as with so many of the subjects he studied, he strode where no one had before. Leonardo lived a fifteenth century life, but a vision of the modern world spread before his mind’s eye.

The show is divided in 5 parts dedicated to the scientific researches and previews of Leonardo with a special emphasis to the flight chapter.

AQUA MAGIC. We have to recall that at Leonardo times, nobody had harnessed electricity yet, so water was at that point the ultimate source for power. Leonardo studied all forms of water – liquid, steam, and ice – and he had all sorts of swell ideas of what to do with it. He cooked up designed a device to measure humidity, a steam-powered cannon, many different waterwheels, and oodles of useful industrial machines powered by flowing water. Images of water in all forms are shown here blended with the original Leonardo animated drawing.

THE ANATOMY OF THE SKULL. Leonardo the scientist bridged the gap between the shockingly unscientific medieval methods and our own trusty modern approach. His experiments in anatomy and the study of fluids, for example, absolutely blew away the accomplishments of his predecessors. The music here is based almost entirely on drums, underlining the basic background heart beat and improvising on it. In the video for the first time appears the mysterious character: Leonardo?

SHADOWS OF WAR – SYMPHONY OFTHE MACHINES. Leonardo was actually really talented as an engineer. Good illustrators were a dime a dozen in Renaissance Italy, but Leonardo had the brains and the diligence to break new ground, usually leaving his contemporaries in the dust. Like many crackpot geniuses, Leonardo wanted to create “new machines” for a “new world”. Throughout his life he had brilliant and far-out ideas, ranging from the practical to the prophetic. As military engineer and architect to Cesare Borgia, Leonardo proposed creating stunning war machines. Military machines are presented here on a background of war images, while the civilian machines are inserted in a futuristic background. The music uses the real machines noise to create a bridge between past and future.

DREAMS OF FLIGHT. Almost an obsession for Leonardo was to find the possibility to have the man fly like the birds that he was studying carefully for years.
He finally learned imitating the way birds glide rather than human powered wing motion was the way to go if any sustained flight for any extended period was expected. His next step would be not imitating nature at all but designing and building winged gliders exclusively by and for human use in mind.
Video images here will take the audience in a ballet of computer animated Leonardo drawing with his machine made flying in music.

THE MUSIC

The crossing of musical messages coming through vast mass-media networks from the variety of musical and cultural spheres active in the world today has made the contemporary music a kaleidoscope of continuous movement and relentless transformation. Superimposition of musical languages, stratifications of forms, and enormously disparate musical ideas aim now for a synthesis, now for a plurality of communication in a musical bedlam. In this bedlam only the definitive classification of information channels helps the music consumer to unravel a tangle of sound, which has become just too intricate.
Those who produce music nave therefore resorted to a comforting and functional division of music into types: classical, jazz and pop are now the established and reassuring terms of the day-to-day relationship between people who buy and sell things musical.
But the creative novelty of this project lies right at the confluence of many tributaries of the great musical river.
An experience from those depths surface various types of musical fragments, instrumental memories from different worlds, the tainting of one type of music with another, all straining for a single form of expressivity: sound.

THE LIVE VIDEO

The hig definition videos are the main core of the live show.
All the inter-action between stage and screen will be balanced musically and sonically with a sound system integrating the video soundtrack into the live sound and controlled by a double computer.

Leonardo remains the center of the action: the narration on screen will cover the mentioned aspects of his genius syncing the live music on stage
Visions of dreamy Tuscany, rich Renaissance costumes, clips from historical footage and animated painting and drawing will be blended harmonically to integrate music and narration in a unique visual and sonic experience. Lighting will provide another emotional contribution to the project, simple but effective.