Pia van Gelder | Correlation of Energies in the Colour Music of Alexander Burnett Hector

This event will be held both on-campus and online

Pia van Gelder is an electronic artist, researcher and historian. Their art practice and scholarship investigates historical and contemporary conceptions of energy and how these shape our relationship with technologies, bodies, and our environments. They have concentrated on the influence of esotericism on electronic instruments of the 20th century and their current project, co-edited with Professor Douglas Kahn, is entitled “The Energies Artists Say” and presents a methodology for understanding the polyvalence of energies in practices across the arts.

Sydney-based chemist Alexander Burnett Hector (1865-1958) was by day the manager of the Australian and New Zealand division of the major pharmaceutical company Burroughs Welcome and Co. but by night he worked inventing colour music instruments. He began with keyboards that activated coloured lights and eventually worked to include additional technologies such as scenographic, hydraulic, and kinetic elements as well as telegraphy. From the first decade of the 20th century and well into the 1950s, Hector presented demonstrations and performances, published patents and articles, and even built a theatre on his property where he housed and presented his evolving instruments. Throughout this time his work was received widely by local press, scientific, creative, and spiritual communities alike, yet he doesn't figure in histories of colour music or Australian media art.

At a time when the material world was revealing itself to be in constant motion through advances in science and technology, Hector was compelled to reveal the correlation of these vibrating and oscillating behaviours through his colour music. This seminar will discuss how he worked to achieve this objective by concentrating on a lecture and demonstration that he gave in 1920 to the Sydney Society of Women Painters.

This event will be held both on-campus and online via Zoom (a link to the online stream will be sent to registered attendees).

The School of Art & Design Seminar series will continue weekly on Tuesdays from 1-2pm, between 13 February and 14 May 2024. 

To see information about upcoming speakers and to register to attend please follow this link https://rb.gy/v923bn

The School of Art & Design Seminar Series is co-convened by Dr Alex Burchmore, Alia Parker, and Elisa Crossing.

Image credit: “A demonstration of 'Colour Music' at the inventor's Greenwich home” Photographed by Hood, Sam, 1872-1953, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales