Trim Subdivisions

In over three decades of work, Bob Snyder has combined synthesized sound and visual imagery to great effect. He played an integral role in developing the Sound Art Department at the School of the Art Institute, where he has been a faculty member since 1974. While formally trained in music and composition, Snyder originally had ambitions as a painter and always maintained a strong interest in visual representation. His early experiments with oscilloscopes—which he used to visualize sound waves and accompany his musical compositions—naturally led him to video technology, which afforded further opportunities to blend the visual and the aural in innovative ways. Among the original collaborators with Dan Sandin at University of Illinois-Chicago’s Circle Graphics Habitat, Snyder was in the vanguard of formal video investigations with the Sandin Image Processor and other experimental equipment.
Trim Subdivisions constitutes a departure from much of Snyder’s work in that it has no soundtrack. The artist created this purely visual composition with the most sophisticated digital effects and editing techniques of the day, which enabled him to manipulate images of tract-house facades that he shot in suburban Indiana. The silence is palpable, adding to the eerie quality of the oppressively uniform architecture.