RGBMusic Subway Synesthesia 1/ 5 Video

Kenji Kojima's series of photographs New York City Subway are presented as diptychs that become the material for his moving image and sound installations. These photographs, along with simple text overlays, act as a sort of eye-to-mind primer that are then dissolved into hundreds of pixels of flowing color and sound. Through RGB Music, these digital photographs are further reduced to their color pixels that are then transformed into a series of musical compositions.

Images from Kojimas New York City Subway photographs form Mondrian-like geometric of colors that correspond to a note or chord in a selected scale. As these photographic musical variations manifest as song poems, the citys underground, the subway, is transformed into music and color. Kojima digs beneath the surface buzz of New York to reveal the poetry and music within them.

As Kojima describes it, is not an impression of a painting or a photograph of a musical variation. It composes a score from an image directly.

RGB Music now includes synchronized 3-D drawing that follows the RGB values along an XYZ axis of the image. The lines become a distinct topography—a visual map of the both the musical score and photographic content.