Oramics: Atlantis Anew

FILM

Oramics: Atlantis Anew
Aura Satz, 2011, UK, video, 7'

Daphne Oram (1925-2003) was a pioneer of British electronic music and co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958. She designed and built a radically new sound recording medium: Oramics. Oram used principles from graphical or drawn sound to compose “handwrought” electronic music, and yet the visual nature of her work remains largely unseen and unsung. Satz here pays homage to the inventor via a close-up portrait of the Oramics machine, now part of the collection of London’s Science Museum. The film brings this obsolete technological fantasy briefly to back to life, enabling the visualisation of the drawn sound material, re-interpreting and translating it into new filmic sequences. The soundtrack features electronic music composed by Oram, interlaced with her voiceover reading excerpts from a first draft of her book An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics (1971).