Marriage of music with animation
‘Rhythms + Visions’ at USC will spotlight the sights and sounds of Patterson + Reckinger.
Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger are artists perfectly comfortable remaining unclassifiable.
You could describe what they do as animation. After all, they teach animation at the University of Southern California and create animation sequences for commercials, film and music videos — most famously for the smash 1980s single “Take on Me” by Norway’s A-ha.
You could also call Patterson + Reckinger (their professional moniker) installation artists. They often create elaborate displays for their work, projecting animations onto artfully arranged screens and architectural elements in ways that shape their designs.
They are musical innovators of sorts as well. Though not musicians, the pair have worked with important avant-garde composers and musical groups to create animated sequences for an array of live performances.
This has included a rainfall of geometric patterns that accompanied a performance by experimental composer Tristan Perich at the Broad Art Center at UCLA in 2015 with toy pianos and one-bit digital tones.
“Ever since we started our careers, we’ve been hybrid,” says Patterson as he admires a wall-sized animation still at USC’s Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts.
Now the pair is about to raise the bar — and the melding of genres.
On Friday, Patterson + Reckinger will host the latest iteration of USC’s “Rhythms + Visions” with animations, projections, live music and virtual reality. The show will feature their work and that of more than six dozen others, including Grammy Award-winning pianist Gloria Cheng and multimedia artists Refik Anadol and Miwa Matreyek, the latter of whom is known for merging live performance with animation.
The display will include projections on weather balloons and a custom 70-footwide screen outside USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.
For one performance, musician Zi-Zhu Zhao will play the guzheng, a traditional Chinese zither that has been around for more than 2,000 years.
“It’s like an art walk,” says Patterson of the event, “but really refined.”
Patterson and Reckinger are a unique artistic team. He is tall, with shaggy brown hair and an unhurried demeanor; she, petite, a wearer of stylish hats and a conversationalist who can’t convey all the ideas she holds in her head fast enough.
The pair are also a couple — finishing each other’s sentences and polishing each other’s ideas.
They’re both from Chicago and attended graduate school in Southern California. She studied film at UCLA. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts with the late Jules Engel, known for his work on “Fantasia,” which married music and animation.
But Patterson and Reckinger didn’t meet until they attended a festival of short films in Europe in 1982.
“We went all the way to Paris to discover we were both from Chicago and lived in L.A.,” says Patterson.
Two years later, they were married (and are now the parents of two adult sons: Jasper and Barney Patterson, both of whom work in electronic music).
It was around the time that they wed that the music video industry came calling.
At CalArts, Patterson had created a nearly fiveminute animated short called “Commuter” crafted from hand-drawn sketches. The film caught the eye of producers at Warner Bros., who then tapped Patterson + Reckinger to animate Aha’s music video.
The video combined liveaction footage, still images and hand-drawn black-andwhite animation. It also riffed on the nature of drawing, with a character attempting to bust out of the comic book frame.
“That was amazing,” recalls Patterson. “It was in heavy rotation on MTV. It was played for 60 weeks! Imagine having your video all over the world.”
That assignment led to others, including the video for Suzanne Vega’s “Luka” and Paula Abdul’s “Opposites Attract,” for which they rendered MC Skat Kat, the singing and dancing cat that appears in the video. The latter gig earned them a Grammy in 1990.
In recent years, Patterson + Reckinger have turned their attention to live classical and avant-garde music — creating, often in collaboration with other artists and animators, wild visual sequences that accompany musicians on stage.
That turn began in 2011, when Michael Tilson Thomas — whom the duo affectionately refer to as “MTT” — then the director of the New World Symphony, approached USC about commissioning animators to create visuals for the debut show at the orchestra’s new Frank Gehry-designed hall in Miami Beach.
“It was five screens and they lit the ceiling,” says Reckinger. “I remember thinking, this more like a hybrid theater experience than just an animation or a cinema experience.”
Patterson + Reckinger have set their animations to compositions by the likes 17th century German composer Johann Sebastian Bach and the very contemporary Thomas Adès.
“What we’ll do is visualize imagery against music,” says Patterson. “Then we’ll listen to the music again, and we create assemblages of pictures to look at while we’re hearing the music to see if combinations work with the sounds.”
Reckinger says that animation can draw neophyte classical audiences into difficult pieces of music.
“If you create a visual approach to the music, people can hear the music better,” says Reckinger. “They can understand the design of the music better. … It’s not that the visuals illustrate it. It’s that the visuals make you aware of certain patterns.”
That’s some of what they’re hoping to Friday achieve at “Rhythm + Visions” — the animationmeets-music show they first launched at USC in 2011.
One musical selection for the show is “Phrygian Gates,” a piano piece by composer John Adams.
Says Patterson: “Hopefully people will come and see everything and say, ‘There’s this music by this guy named John Adams and it’s really great.’ ”