About Andy Warhol’s Empire flicker visualization Pasquale Napolitano, Stefano Perna, Pier Giuseppe Mariconda Prologue - In a 1989 essay Giovanni Anceschi, designer and researcher in visual communication was seeking a term to give a name to a particular dimension of the visual design – the one that concerns electronic moving images - that was different from the term “video-art” and its inherent temptations of aesthetical auto-legitimation. The choice falls on the term heidomatic design, based on the incredible “morphogenetic” potential contained in the new computer technologies. Anceschi himself defines this type of activity as "the activity of planning artificial details or parts of them, that is the communicative products that circulate in the audiovisual media". According to this definition, the term video-design has been chosen to name the object of our researchs. In this term it sounds like a general formulation that has the tendency not to confine the circle of action and reflection of the design in the planning of artificial materials or in a generic operation of stylization of the product, but rather it tries to expand and to develop the project perspective in the sense of a general ability of decoding and analysis of the communicative artefacts. A vast area of production of images in movement exists, endowed with an enormous wealth of languages, solutions, innovations, that it is not possible to categorize in the structured forms of the cinema or of the video-art, even to investigate with the aid of the analytical categories of these two expressive circles of it. 1. To allow this a reflection the design dimension is necessary on of the video-artefact, on its position inside the objects-system. In this perspective it becomes fundamental to set the attention to the concept of composition. The passage from the logic of the linear editing to that of the composition brings to the rising of a particular type of medial object, containing its own logic, an inside stratification, specific times and specific rhythms. Already notion of "object" redefines him because of the extreme instability of the digital image: from solid and definitive entity, the digital object turns him into the temporary visualization of an encoded signal in a certain way. It will be set the attention on the definition of the inside grammar to the planning of such artefact typology, individualizing some of the transversal logics that allow of interlace among them fragments video on the space-time of the screen, among which pattern, layer, loop. The continuous reference to the universe of the artistic experimentation can act from indicative jewel of the new ways of feel, to perceive and to know proper of the video-cultures. In this perspective it could be of extreme interest to analyze that area of experimentation, already very advanced from the point of view of the realizations but almost entirely unexplored from the theoretical-critical point of view, transversal to a series of productive practices (software art, genetic art, veejaying), that investigates really the unpublished and disruptive possibilities of elaboration, mapping and "aesthetic result" of the video flows and to which he is turning as with always greater interest not so much the traditional disciplines of aesthetics but the universe of the planning. 2. A moving image is a signal that continuosly change in time. More than forms, figures and volumes, it is made of dimensions, frequencies, intensities. On a digital medium image and sound share the same substance: electronic coded impulses. What at a first glance may appear as a simple technical factor, can become an aesthetic hypothesis. In the era of digital technologies we can mention acustic or musical factors of an image not only in a metaphorical way. A new kind of connection is emerging. Now it is possible to create interactions, driven by mathematical rules, between the audible and the visible media in a way that erodes the barrier between the two fields of sound and image. With digital media we reach the indistinguishable point where image becomes sound and sound becomes image. In our project, a patch written in EyesWeb analyzes the moving image extracting some parameters that are subsequently converted in a data stream. Data are translated to a MIDI signal that controls audio software and synthesizers. This process gives the sound a deep sensibility to the variations of the moving image. Selected movies are analyzed and "played" back . Most of them are from american underground cinema of the '60. The experimental approach of some directors of that period - their approach to cinema as a medium and as a "machine" - deeply influenced the birth of what now we call "new media". The selection is at the same time a homage to that directors and a media archaeology research.