'My background is in music. For me, it is the sound that leads me into the image. Every image has its own sound and in it I attempt to capture something flowing and living. I apply the same principle to art as to playing the violin: with the same attitude of continuous practice, the same concept of composition. Since my art schooling was in music, I do not think of images as stills, but always as motion.'
Steina Vasulka ‘Violin Power’, 1978
'One of the things about a musical score is that if there’s something in there that you’re not perceiving, because it requires more attention than you’re giving it, it gives you another way in to hear something. I’ve had people say, about pieces of music they’ve loved and known all their life, that after watching one of my videos they see something in it that they’d never heard before and now they hear it every time they listen to that piece of music. It’s part of the education, people don’t realize that when you’re listening to a piece of music you’re learning how to hear it, how to make sense of it.'
Björk
Reflection
Reflecting on the process of working with these audiovisual techniques, it’s interesting how difficult it seems to convey the feeling of actually being in the room with the artwork, drawing on the notion of site-specificity. Despite the fact that the components of the piece exist digitally first and foremost (audio produced on a loop pedal, visuals through Resolume) the third piece which exists in the experience is the space, intertwined with the people inhabiting that environment.
I can compare two instances of seeing Lis Rhodes’ ‘Dresden Dynamo’, once intentionally in its exhibition form and another time by chance on the Southbank (this time without its audio track). The question was then raised for me as to where I would perform or display my own audiovisual pieces and how I might intend or invite the audience to participate within them. Lis Rhodes 'subverts the synchronisation process’ between the audio and visual in this piece and I also wonder whether I may do similar, unlike my audiovisual sketches so far where the audio is directly manipulating the visual.
My current feeling is that my series of audiovisual sketches, along with accompanying research, could provide the groundwork for a performative/exhibition piece integrating my live music performance with audio-reactive visuals to form my final MA project. We talked about immersion during our lecture series, describing a ‘bridge between real and mythic spaces’. We all experience locations in a different way and overlay our own layers of meaning onto them. Sinclair writes, ‘The city is a series of these psychic mappings that reinforce our own identity’. Perhaps these intermedial VJ’ing tools can be a vehicle for such immersion? I find myself repeatedly thinking back to two exhibitions in this respect. The fist being Anthony McCall at The Hepworth Wakefield and the second being Lis Rhodes at Nottingham Contemporary, both examples of immersive audiovisual installation. I feel they could be useful precedents for my final project next year. In both cases the viewer becomes a silhouette and in turn a part of the artwork and environment - an architecture of light and sound. It is as though the viewer is overlaid on top of the artist’s mythic space.
Rhythms of the city, responding to a sense of place through audiovisual mapping.
Thesis
My creative practice as a musician has often been inspired by a sense of place and rooting within the city I live. Past experiences as an architecture student also inform my mapping of location, both in a physical and emotional sense. I’ve become particularly interested in the way these processes intersect, using VJ software as a tool to cross over the audio and visual. I believe this process has a transmedial quality which can fuse the artist’s internal world with the external landscape. I’m also excited by the intermedial relationship in my work, where the audio changes the image fundamentally. It intrigues me when an audiovisual piece is neither a music video for a song, nor a soundtrack for a film. Rather it can be an all encompassing artwork with an intent that becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
Being rooted within and aware of an environment can provide inspiration which adds a new, almost ethereal layer to the location. In his ‘London Overground’ documentary, Iain Sinclair poetically describes such instances as ‘luminous locales’. I believe that intermedial VJ software can be an effective tool to represent such places. My audiovisual sketches investigate this idea.
Process
After moving to London in July, my instinctive creative response has been in the writing of a series of instrumental tracks, entitled ‘South London Loops’. These compositions have soundtracked (both mentally and literally) my explorations in and around London and have also been used as the basis for two live performances for the Goldsmiths Electronic Music Studios. The recorded tracks form the material for the audio element to my audiovisual sketches, illustrated by my process diagram.
‘SLL4 / Peninsula’, my most recent audiovisual sketch, uses a photograph taken from Greenwich Peninsula then translates it into motion through using a combination of audio-reactive effects on Resolume VJ software. The artwork came about as a blending of a photograph with an instrumental track, forming an emotive statement which to me describes more than either element individually. While composing the piece, I became mesmerised by the intermedial nature of the practice, watching the results on my projector while adjusting audio parameters on my loop pedal that in turn would manipulate the image through Resolume.
The words of Björk and Steina Vasulka, raised during our lectures and readings, stood out to me when describing this relationship between music and image.
It’s also interesting to note how much Vasulka’s work went on to influence the software used by video jockeys:
‘Developing software that was later utilized by video jockeys looking to merge sound and image, the Vasulkas’ electric ZETA violin could assign specific functions to different strings or individual notes. This enabled her to change the speed or direction of a visual sequence, repeat prerecorded progressions, or control the actions of other performers. The computer technology used in Violin Power enabled a more versatile form of audiovisuality, because a single idea could be continually revoiced in a variety of contexts.’
Walking through London at night, happening upon back routes and new connections, reminds me of musical discovery, stumbling upon ideas and following instincts. I feel an alluring kind of focus at night, some combination of the artificial bright lights and the contrasting enveloping darkness. From this area of south east London I can often see the Shard, poking its head atop estates and tree lines. I’m most drawn to it at night, an otherworldly Beacon and a reminder of the scale of this new city I find myself within.
The photographer Richard Billingham also picked up on this feeling, referring to his ‘Black Country’ photographs: ‘my senses seemed more heightened at night due to the silence and the darkness and the fact that no one else was around.’
More specifically to London, I identified this emotion within two documentaries which delved into the work of Burial, a pioneering and influential electronic musician. I wasn’t very familiar with this musician’s work at the time I watched the documentaries, however the way in which the work was described strongly resonated with me.
The quotes hit me in both a practical and emotional sense, reflecting both my own consumption and creation of music. I find a sense of focus when listening to music while walking at night. Similarly, it’s a process I’ve used many times in the past to incrementally develop the music I write. This process is often accompanied by the feeling that ‘just sort of disappears’ when wandering through the city at night, headphones on. Diegetic to our lives perhaps or ‘sewn into the diegesis’? Michael Bull writes that iPod and Walkman users "often refer to their experiences as being ‘cinematic’ in nature,” alternatively imagining themselves as the filmmakers, actors, characters, and spectators of their own lives."
I accompany these quotes with two video game references (a screenshot from 'Half Life 2' and the soundtrack from 'Firewatch') which both hold qualities of a soundtracked disconnection, quite beautiful in its eeriness. I can think of moments while wandering through the city that felt like a video game, my experiences of a fictional world blending into my reality. To me there’s a kind of world building quality here which contrasts with a stereotype where headphone users are perceived to be disconnected from their environments.
Richard Billingham - 'Black Country, Nightime 2003'
Half Life 2 Screenshot
Firewatch Soundtrack
Reading Mark Fisher’s introduction to Hauntology pointed me towards watching Chris Petit’s film ‘Content’ which inspired me in both form and subject matter. Fisher describes ‘Content’ as ‘an anatomy of the non-places of post-Fordist Britain’. I’m interested in how Petit overlays his own identity onto the landscapes through which he moves, in his case when ‘driving through the bleak flatlands of late middle age’.
This aesthetic is mirrored in the book ‘Edgelands’ by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, a reading which resonated with me in particular when describing the ‘Midlands edgelands wilderness’ which I grew up around and has formed a part of my own identity. It made me reflect on my own creative practice, regarding it as a form of audiovisual mapping. While I’ve been inspired by a host of different media (albums, films, books, photographs, paintings…) I’m excited about how I can make use of intermedial VJ software to further explore the distinct atmosphere of such 'luminous locales'.
My own creative practice has often felt inspired by places on the edge or disconnected distance which reflect the quotes from the documentaries about Burial's work. ‘SLL4 / Peninsula’ concerns the dissonance between Greenwich Peninsula and Canary Wharf. This feeling of distance and disconnection inspired me to relay my recorded audio back through a delay pedal, creating a sound of distance. This can be heard live in my performance for the EMS at the George Wood Theatre. I was definitely inspired by the themes of Hauntology here, identifying a relationship between the delayed sound and the haze on the photograph.
London based DJ Moxie describes Burial's work as having - ‘a fascination with life's liminal states'. I wonder whether audiovisual artwork is liminal in its nature and therefore well suited to expressing liminal feelings? Holly Rogers describes it as ‘betwixt and between’ disciplines, with the expression also referring to being ‘betwixt and between different social and existential spaces' in which 'the person becomes acutely aware of his or her social and cultural positioning’. From my perspective it's a feeling expressed in Petit's documentary and a theme that I have also been exploring within my own audiovisual sketches.
Audiovisual Sketch 3 - 'Wick Bridge'
'Content' - Chris Petit
Mono Works - Live at the George Wood Theatre (click to play)