The Creation Cycle
1972-78

The Creation Cycle was a series of seven pioneering video recordings made over 7 years. They arose from an exploration of the nature of the universe, the nature of human consciousness, and the connections between the two.

The imagery and sound of all the pieces were performed and recorded by Peter Donebauer and Simon Desorgher “playing” and improvising around a theme together in real time, with both participants having visual and aural feedback of each other’s transforming contributions as they affected the piece in real time and thus in turn their own continuing contributions. The resulting final recorded tape represents the best live “take” from several recordings done at the time.

Peter developed his visual techniques through access to the old ATV colour studio donated to the Royal College of Art by Lew Grade. These techniques involved manipulating the studio in many ways for which it was never designed, enabling the development of a form of “Electronic Painting” equivalent to the “Electronic Music” that was being first developed around that time. This led on to the later development of the Videokalos image processing synthesiser.

Peter was the creative force conceptually. The artworks resulted from a period of liminal personal experiences and are all somewhat “shamanic” in their creation – a period of many days internal meditation, followed by two days immersion in a darkened studio, and a resulting artwork to share with others. The works have been described as “intermedial”.

Simon performed and co-ordinated the sound elements using a mixture of traditional musical instruments and electronic processing and generation. He studied flute and electronic composition at the Royal College of Music, London.