Modell 5 is a digital video performance created by Ulf Langheinrich and Kurt Hentschläger (aka Granular Synthesis) that utilizes the same principles of granular synthesis to distort video. These Austrian artists used the performance to showcase the development of an audiovisual synthesizer, which they’ve been working on for years. Modell 5 premiered in 1994 at the ICC London and is still being shown today.

The performance consists of four 10 x 3.5 meter screens with projections of Japanese performance artist Akemi Takeya’s face. The image is manipulated digitally by a computer, which warps it in a nightmarish way. Synched up with mechanical rhythms and drones, the experience is both disturbing and beautiful. It seems as though the video was composed just like a piece of music.

Granular synthesis is a method of splitting samples into many tiny (1-50 ms in length) sounds, or grains. The grains are then layered on top of one another playing back at different speeds, pitches and volumes. This creates a thick atmosphere of sound instead of one single tone. In a similar way, the video in Modell 5 is being broken down into individual frames and edited back together. If you’re interested in the audio end of granular synthesis, you can research Curtis Roads or check out audio samples of Native Instrument’s Spectral Delay plugin.