Artist Resume – Interview
e-Book on Digital Esthetic – Essay on Permeable Boundaries
Artist Resumé
My life-long artistic pursuits, most of them based on working digitally, include music, poetry, and visual art. I took up these disciplines at different times of my life so that they began to exist in parallel, poetry and music, music and visual arts. I started writing poetry at age 17 [1953], followed by music composition [1963] and work in the visual arts [animations, digital painting and graphics, 2010].
The need to express myself is ongoing: in 2024, upon the death of my spouse Nadine Boughton, also a poet and visual artist, I returned to poetry writing.
Throughout my life, I have been eager to understand the nature and structure of the creative process. You will find this made explicit in my e-book on Digital Esthetics in About, and in Compositional Practice under Music.
As a poet, I am influenced by the German poets Gottfried Benn and Paul Celan in my early work, and by Williams Carlos Williams and Denise Levertov in my later work.
Two German teachers of mine, both composers, have made a lasting impact on my life and work: composers Konrad Lechner (https://www.universaledition.com/en/Contacts/Konrad-Lechner/; https://www.wisemusicclassical.com/composer/2659/Konrad-Lechner/) and Gottfried Michael Koenig (https://koenigproject.nl/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Michael_Koenig).
K. Lechner taught me micro-counterpoint, an approach to composition I transferred to electronic music, while through his Project One composition program, G. M. Koenig taught me how to design compositions “top down”, based on a small set of musical ideas from which his computer program derived abundant numerical output calling for imaginative interpretation on the side of the artist, not only in music.
Koenig’s Project One program gave rise to the notion of the Computer as the Artist’s Alter Ego, a notion I still subscribe to, as seen under Music/Compositional Process (on Project One) and under Poetry in the e-book on Digital Esthetics. A further explication of this philosophy is found under Gallery (https://aatonau.com/otto-laske-redefining-art-through-digital-experimentation).
