Mash a Kandinsky with a Duchamp, crumple one of Zaha Hadid’s smaller architectural experiments with H.R. Geiger’s eerie organic forms, cram the whole thing into a high-definition television, and you might end up with something like the art of Scott Pagano. Grind down the gritty, industrial detritus of Rotterdam — one of the world’s largest port cities — and process it in a digital audio factory and you may, if you’re lucky, get something that sounds like the mechanized mayhem of Jochem Paap, a.k.a. “Speedy J.” Blend it all together in a high-fidelity digital soup and you get, well, you get something entirely new.

Known for melding mind-bending graphics with edgy stills, Pagano has crafted pieces for musicians like BT and Richard Devine, but he’s also worked on international ad campaigns for the likes of Nike and XXX. Paap churns up dance floors across the world and is one of Europe’s hardest-working DJs. He’s also a prolific producer who has remixed Depeche Mode, Bjork, the Shamens, and many more. As if that wasn’t enough, he has formulated sounds for Native Instruments, television commercials, and major motion pictures.

The filmmaker and the musician have merged their separate but surprisingly similar talents into a synthesis of audio and video. They’ve slammed music and motion together to create “Umfeld,” a surround-sound DVD that remixes the very notion of digital art. And they’ve made the new medium mobile, storming dance clubs and multimedia laboratories worldwide with a live version of their creation, fusing sight and sound on the fly.

What instruments do the radical artists turn to when they conduct their audio-visual experiments? “It’s a no-brainer for me to pick the Mac,” says Pagano. “Production has to be transparent. It is critical that I have as few technical problems as possible. On the Mac, technical problems have been stripped away.”

“I’m addicted to the Mac because it’s transparent,” says Paap. “I’m a musician. I want to get my idea across and I want the line between the thought and the result to be as short as possible. And there’s only one computer that allows me to do that and it’s the Mac.”

Perfection Meshed

The line that wired Paap and Pagano’s thoughts together was, in actuality, a world-spanning filament of optical and copper cable that ran from California to the Netherlands. The two connected via email and created their first music-motion chimera by exchanging information through the electronic ether. “I got an email from Jochem, asking if I would be interested in working on a new project with him,” says Pagano. “I have been a big fan of his music for a long time and I had thought about working with him.”

“I wanted to accompany my music with visuals and I knew Scott from looking at his website,” adds Paap. “After seeing his work I thought that his style would match mine.”

To comprehend why Pagano and Paap experienced this mutual artistic magnetism, it helps to understand their work. Stripped bare, Pagano’s work reveals a fine-art aesthetic that was cultivated in galleries, museums, and photography exhibits. He was reared on art as a kid and dabbled in photography, painting, music, and ultimately video. At Brown University he deconstructed the art of signs and symbols, a field known as art semiotics. “It was basically the department at Brown that had all the good video equipment,” he says. “So I did some abstract video work with all these new and exotic tools like non-linear editors and computer graphics programs.”

As Pagano’s multimedia lab evolved, so did his artwork. He later put out a few DVDs and crafted motion graphics for commercial customers. The artist worked with international design firm AKQA to craft a Nike ad campaign featuring basketball legend Lebron James and built motion graphics for yU+Co, an effects and graphics house known for its stunning movie title sequences, visual effects, and innovative network branding campaigns. “I’ve learned a lot from the commercial environment,” he says. “There’s a certain level of polish and refinement that are pervasive in the industry and it’s important to know how to produce it.” Major studios also guide the filmmaker in his quest to create a more efficient studio. “I can see the workflow of the big studios and apply that to my small studio and my own projects,” he says. “That really helps me work faster and better.”

Most recently, Pagano wove two stunning cinematic pieces for “This Binary Universe,” an epic DVD-surround sound project by electronic music maestro BT. His work was, and is, precise, exacting, and cutting-edge.

Paap is one of Europe’s most venerated electronic musicians. On vinyl and in clubs he’s known as Speedy J, a wickedly precise and mechanically driven DJ. “Rotterdam is a very industrial city, a pretty rough place,” he says. “And the environment always has a big influence on the artistic product.” In Speedy J’s workshop, Rotterdam’s factories, refineries, machine shops, and all things mechanized get quantized into meticulous beats. The musician also tinkers with popular musical releases, tuning them to create unique Speedy J remixes. His audio workshop also cranks out handcrafted sounds for Native Instruments Reaktor and other sound studios worldwide. “I consider working with programmers and instrument manufacturers equally important as putting out material,” he says. “I feel this is necessary and will contribute to sound design in an important way.” Paap is a meticulous sonic craftsman, one who only settles for the best.

Pagano and Paap’s exacting styles meshed and together they created “Umfeld.”

Creative Collaboration

Pagano and Paap zapped their ideas back and forth using iChat,email, and good old telephone lines. Paap had cut most of the surround-sound tracks for the DVD, but was still formulating the last few when Pagano got onboard. “I thought, we can take this to the next level and come up with new ways to work with pixels and sound,” says Pagano. That meant gleaning inspiration from Paap’s tracks, constructing 2D and 3D imagery using Adobe After Effects and Photoshop, Shake, Maya, and Max/MSP/Jitter. The artist drew all his pieces together in Final Cut Pro.

“Final Cut is indifferent to formats and resolutions,” says Pagano. “It can handle anything I can throw at it. That is incredibly important for what I do.”

Paap plotted the music for the project using Max/MSP, Native Instruments Traktor and Kontakt, and Logic Pro — the trusted tools for nearly every one of his musical projects. All the tracks for the DVD were composed in 5.1 surround, an exciting new medium for Paap. “It was inspiring to think about composing for a multiple-speaker setup,” he says. “It’s been done before, but not really in the kind of music I produce.” The producer plugged his sounds into Logic Pro, where he massaged them with filters and effects. Using Logic Pro’s native surround sound capabilities, he mixed his music for six audio channels. “I assemble and treat everything with Logic,” he says. “It’s the end stage for any piece of music I create.”

To find better synergy between music and motion, Pagano flew to Rotterdam to work with Paap in person. There, amid the inner workings of the industrial city, the artist found inspiration. He and Paap explored Rotterdam, equipped with an HD camcorder and still photography equipment. He shot the city’s grit and grime, its industrial structure.

The artists built on those rough foundations together. “Jochem’s music is almost abstract,” says Pagano. “It’s in the realm of sound design and creating narrative or story was not going to be appropriate. But the music got me very excited about audio-visual synchronization. I pulled the energy and the movement out of the music and mapped it to 2D and 3D graphics. Then we developed the concept of moving through a series of environments with each track.”

For example: Some of Pagano’s abstract artistic environments are filled with 3D metallic flora that grows over serene stills of the city, every motion precisely synced to Paap’s sonic salvo. “My understanding of music and sound really helps in a project like this,” says Pagano. “The connection allows me to work with musicians in a very subtle way.”

Subtle Improvisation

That fine interplay between music and motion graphics is easily channeled into an intriguing live reinterpretation of “Umfeld.” The two artists jam together, feeding off their common creative energy to create new material. “In a band, you gain an understanding of your bandmates,” says Pagano. “You become a team because you inherently develop a sensitivity to what they’re going to do.” Pagano and Paap share that nearly psychic connection, weaving their two mediums together like improvising musicians.

The live show requires an array of portable audio-video tech. Pagano employs a MacBook Pro, a Mac mini, an iPod, a DVD player, and a video mixer. He pulls clips — virtually everything he’s ever created — from the various storage devices and routes them through the mixer. He previews those clips using a custom browser-player application he created using Max/MSP. The browser allows him to sort his clips on the fly and nab whatever he needs to accompany Paap’s music.

Paap packs two Mac laptops, one running Native Instruments Traktor and the other running Ableton Live. He controls both with an Allen & Heath Xone 3D mixing desk. The mixer flawlessly interfaces with Paap’s Macs, allowing him to throw faders and tweak knobs in each application without touching a mouse. “It enables me to control every aspect of the software,” he says. “To me, it’s a much more human interface than a keyboard and mouse.” The DJ sends MIDI timing info to Pagano, who uses it to precisely sync his visuals with each audio track.

The performance can be customized for any space. “It’s totally scalable,” says Pagano. “We can do it with one screen, two screens, surround speakers or stereo speakers. The venue dictates how the performance will go and it’ll be different every time.”

Refining Imagery and Sound

“Different” is essentially at the core of Pagano and Paap’s work. Both artists continue to strive to create new art forms and media for expression. “I’m very excited about all the things that could be done with sound-image relationships,” says Pagano. “There are a lot of creative and technical avenues to go down.”

High-definition video is one such avenue for Pagano. He’s worked with HD extensively, but he plans to push his art even further into the realm of high-resolution video. “Coming from a photography and cinema background, I really love beautiful, refined images,” he says. “As video artists, we didn’t have access to that kind of quality until recently. We were stuck with a format (television) that was basically defined in the ‘30s. Now, with HD video and Final Cut Pro, we can produce much cleaner and refined work. And with the Mac, we have the computing horsepower to do it all.”

Paap plans to explore the emerging realm of multi-channel sound design. “Surround sound and the surround-sound design domain is a very Wild West area at the moment and working in a new medium like multi-channel surround forces you to find creative solutions to new problems,” he says. “That’s when amazing things happen. That’s when new and exciting music emerges.”