• Luigi Russolo
  Russolo and his assistant Ugo Piatti with their Intonarumori
  Courtesy Pietro Verardo, Venice
  

At The Art Gallery of NSW:
Luigi Russolo, one of the founders of Italian futurism, wrote The Art of Noises in 1913, in which he expressed his enthusiasm for the birth of a new modern age where everything appeared to move and to take place rapidly. He intentionally wanted to break down the barriers between music and the noises of daily life, and he dreamed of a revolution in society that would move through all forms of sensory perception. In his painting La Rivolta (The Revolt) (1911) the rebels become a single unit, with the city buildings and streets overturned, and prisms of electric lights created. Energy is expressed by means of a succession of acute angles prolonging the composition and seeming to move outwards beyond the limits of the painted canvas. The content depicted – a mass pushing against the city in revolt – determined the formal revolution in the painting: a literal turning upside down of the city.

At Pier 2/3:
The Italian futurist artist Luigi Russolo was the son of an organist in the local cathedral; his brothers were also musicians. He believed in erasing the boundary between ‘sound’ and ‘noise’, and that there must be continuity between music and all the noises of human existence. Russolo’s instruments, the noise-making machines he called Intonarumori, show his experiments in creating a palette of noise and sound. These machines, basic in appearance, consist of solid boxes fitted with metal speakers. Their design allows them to produce an infinite variety of timbres according to the noise chosen. With his assistant Ugo Piatti, Russolo prepared the Intonarumori for a number of full-scale concerts that he conducted from 1914.

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