Neal Ascherson writing in Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland, ‘Scottish earth is in most places … a skin over bone, and like any taut face it never loses a line once acquired.’
Another passage on the same page reads
Where the coal measures approached the surface , men opened mines and built mining villages. Where the sea was shallow and enclosed, people settle around salt pans … communities are improvisations in strait circumstances.
Neal Ascherson Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland (2002, p27)
Although Ascherson is making specific reference to the impact of Scotland’s, at times hostile, landscape I think that there is wider point to recognise. Human settlement historically happened close to important resources, making those resources easy to access and exploit. The exploitation of these resources left marks and scars on the landscape, but the places also left marks on the people as well.
I think that this is an interesting idea to engage with in the poetic film, the relationship between place and community. This is especially the case in Norfolk where the landscape was clearly managed and maintained.
Really well produced composition and music video celebrating Voyager’s golden disk
One of my peers suggested that I have a look at this music video as potential inspiration for my Voyager project. I thought that it was beautifully produced, both in terms of sound and images, and largely echos how I feel about Voyager.
It is a great inspiration in that this is exactly what I don’t want to do with my major project, this is a celebratory retelling of the Voyager story, watching this helped me to clarify that this is not what I want to do.
For me Voyager is just a lens for looking a different idea.
This was almost the final submission but the loss of resolution from the 4K to HD conversion made the image look really soft (I think the high contrast of the image made it noticeable). I also realised there was an additional setting I had missed in the VR audio.
If possible please watch in a 360 headset with headphones for the full immersive experience.
The ambisonic audio was really immersive but I really wasn’t interested in the blended images any more. On the other hand the mirrored forest became hypnotic in the headset, I lost sense of up and down.
When viewed on a smartphone or headset the motion controller interactively changes the view as you move creating a highly immersive experience. The controls in the top left also disappear.
I was surprised at the sense of floating that I felt and someone else commented on when I passed it around the office. I think there are definitely artistic possibilities for the this kind of experience beyond documentary, and journalism.
When viewed this way this mirror forest concept seemed to more strongly evoke the artificial nature of the forest, with its managed, equally-spaced trees. I was inspired to develop a more musical version of the soundscape to further highlight this.
The concept was based around the structure of the 4 channels of the ambisonic audio file. I used the same process of using the 4 Buses in Audition to organise and mix 4 differently themed tracks.
The first was a development of the birdsong that I had developed for the previous ambisonic track, but simplified.
The second was a repeating loop of a fly.
The third was the most musical elements, a synthesised Xylophone created from a series of recordings that I had made of rustic Xylophone in a children’s play area.
This is not the one I recorded but looks very similar
I recorded each of the notes being struck then used the same technique as my reman synth for the Kino project to create a software synthesiser in Garageband. This time rather than playing it with a mathematical sequence I played it with a midi keyboard, trying to respond to the wind I could hear and see in the.
Played with palms not fingers
Once I had the track I ran it through a few reverb, and delay effects.
The forth channel was the sea.
I felt bringing these four elements together sonically represented the environment that we experienced in Norfolk; forest, sea, natural, artificial.
For this experiment I changed the blend mode from lighten or darken to difference. I felt this might highlight the different environments. Below are comparisons of the same frame to show the dramatic change by switching blending modes I have been wanting to experiment with…
I received some really useful feedback on the ideas for my final project voyager film.
It was clear that there is going to be a challenge to bring the joyous, fun, playful elements to the film, so many of the themes that I want to explore can quickly become gloomy. It is precisely this line that I want to explore.
During the discussion I was asked a question about being vegan. I hadn’t linked this to my thoughts on this project but it is a useful insight, I believe that all life is sacred, it is something that for me adds complexity to the human experience, to live we must consume and destroy others. This is a fundamental universal principle, I’m going to come back to entropy again later.
There was some discussion about how I will approach the practical aspects of the project. I am still working on the synthetic voice concept mentioned previously and have been asking questions about the gender of the voice (I’m going to come back to the cyborg manifesto later as well).
I have been researching archive of the images, which I found on the Kino project, and plan to include some of that.
A model of voyager, possibly 3D printed.
Mylar foil.
Super8 film
My own voice
After a really useful discussion with a colleague at work it was suggested that my voice should play a part in the film, as I am the one that is anthropomorphising voyager. I think this could have an additional layer in that my – regional – voice will not sound epic or sublime, but folksy and mundane, this might contrast well with the more ethereal synthesis.
I might have found a title – I don’t think the Earth is so still. It was a joke in a message that another colleague pointed out might work.
It seems that the themes that tug at us reveal themselves in every project that we explore. I sat listening to The Commander Thinks Aloud (2005, The Long Winters) in the car on repeat, I was trapped by the interplay of the beautiful hopefulness and the inevitable sadness. The layering of folky piano, cosmic synthesisers, and military drums create a tension between uplifting and grounding. The track imagines the last moments of the crew of the Columbia Shuttle disaster.
Dogs and birds on lawns. From here I can touch the sun. Put your jacket on, I feel we are being born.
(The Commander Thinks Aloud, 2005, The Long Winters)
I find this question of mundane followed by sublime occupies a lot of my ideas.
(2005, The Long Winters)
I wondered why I felt the need to ground my voyager film, Space Exploration for me is sublime, it is romance. Early in our relationship my wife and I went to see a shuttle launch, it is not just science but spiritual.
But how do we square this with the costs of this dreaming; human, financial, environmental, personal. For all the success there are stories of failed marriages, the memorial, budgets, failed careers, toxic waste.
I found myself thinking back to the ideas of the romantics, the nieve vistas dreaming of imagined ideal pasts, the power, beauty, inspiring and terrifying nature. Head in the clouds no realistic view of the world. I find many of the ideas of the romantics troubling, an idealisation of the natural world, the primacy of mans place in viewing it. But where is the joy if you can’t dream big, a life bounded only by the tangible.
I thought about the realism and abstraction debate in art. Abstraction tried to remove the trappings of the tangible world to reach a deeper more profound truth. But how can we waste time of intellectual navel gazing when there are so many obvious real problems that are in front of us. Goya.
These are the questions of life, is it this physical world of sensation or is the some deeper spiritual journey.
Stuck in mundane commuter traffic, listening to that track I was in two places at once, soaring above it all and trapped in a hot steel box. I stepped out and saw this…
I like daytime moon. How odd it looks against a blue sky, mischievous, almost subversive.
I want to try and address this space with this film as impossibly ambitious as that is, that is the point.
So how do you bridge this gap? Good design has always evolved from a consideration of context and so it is all about establishing a robust bedrock of knowledge from which more real-world and, hopefully, ethically driven problem-solving approaches can develop.
For a start we need to understand the social, political and economic contexts from which these significant ideas in design have emerged in order to have a more informed debate about the trajectory of contemporary design practice.
This passage resonated with me when I read it because I feel it is all too easy to get lost in the detail of what and how we are making something. I spend a considerable portion of time reminding student filmmakers and artists to explore why they are making, and where their work fits into a wider context, I don’t always remember my own lessons. I am going to try and spend a series of blog posts exploring some of the context both of the film that I am making and of space exploration. Hopefully this will lead me to a richer what and how.
Last week we had a discussion about how the different areas of the site could link together. I always find this a useful exercise when planning the navigation for an interactive project as it helps to visualise the structure and make it manageable.
In this project I want to explore a question of Life, through the lens of the Voyager Space programme.
Like other elements of space exploration Voyager could be seen as one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
On 14th February 1990 Voyager 1 turned back to face earth from the edge of the solar system and took an image, this image has become known as the pale blue dot. In it we earth looks insignificant, barely noticeable above the background noise.
Attached to both of the Voyager crafts hull is a golden disk, a message to the cosmos from the inhabitants of earth, a message that might outlast all of us.
The two Voyager probes sent back (and continue to send back) huge amounts of data. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, the very edges of the solar system. The Voyager probes have taught us huge amounts about the solar system and our place in it.
But did anyone ask the probes if they wanted to go?
There are films and documentaries that cover and celebrate the people and achievements, this film will attempt to experiment with taking to point of view of voyager. Cold, battered by radiation, slowly running out of power, lost, lonely, bored.
This film will be an experimental exploration of these ideas, casting Voyager 1 as Mavin the Paranoid Android.
When chatting to someone (sorry can’t remember who) last week about the 360 edits that I had experimented with there was discussion about hiding the tripod by mirroring the footage. I thought that might be interesting with the forest footage that already has a very repetitive pattern.
Mirror Forest
I used a simple mirror effect in Premiere Pro to film the footage just above the ground level to create the illusion of infinite trees.
Premiere Pro Mirror effect
I also worked with a number of the birdsong/forest recordings that we had in Audition to remove the wind and road noise (and a fighter jet at one point) as much as possible.
Selective audio frequency edits and a few passes of noise reduction
I think the resulting film is a slightly surreal experience in 360.
I showed the first 2 360 experiments today to get some reactions and feedback. There were some really interesting conversations that echoed some of the difficulties that I was having approaching where to start with editing 360 footage.
A number of people commented that is was difficult to know where to start with a critique of the work because watching 360 is still such a new experience.
Experiment 1 started an interesting conversation about the frustration of having the control taken away from viewer when the video cuts, once a viewer is fined control to choose where to look it is jarring having it taken away again. The feedback did suggest that once the rhythm of the repeating images became clear that frustration was removed. I am going to try using slow cross fades on the cuts at the beginning to try and lead the viewer through the transition. I think it is worth pursuing this experiment further as viewers seemed to be engaged as they got the narrative expectation on the approaching cow. It was also notable that viewers didn’t start to ask more thematic questions once the more direct narrative became clear.
Experiment 2 seemed to be more immediately engaging as viewer commented that they wanted to explore the whole space to understand how the composite images had been created. I wonder if this interest will be engaged over multiple viewings and exploration once the novelty of the images has worn off?
This is my second experiment editing a 360 film, I wanted to try and use the layer effect to create a spacial narrative, rather than seeing a series of images in sequence that expresses and idea. No mater where the viewer looks they are looking through the images to be combined.
I like the combination of the forest and sea here, as these were the dominate features of the landscape that we encountered during the immersive. It suggests how the actions of these environments shaped the settlement of these areas, also the impact settlement has had on these places.
Process
The effect was created by using the lighten and darken transparency blend modes in Premiere Pro.
The background layer is a series of underwater clips with Cross Dissolve transitions between them whilst the foreground layer is a series wooded locations again with Cross Dissolves.
I wasn’t sure layers and blend modes would work with 360 footage
The frequent movement in the underwater footage and the dissolve transitions generate constantly changing patterns where the blend mode produces unexpected results.
The combination of images in 360 is surprising and moves away from the static nature of the 360 cameraI am not hugely pleased with the way the underwater housing looks in this image
Norfolk is a weirdly long way from the West Midlands.
Even on a fairly quiet afternoon it still took over 3 hours to get from Coventry to Weybourne. This is interesting to me as it highlights that unevenness of infrastructure investment in the UK.
Norfolk is flat.
Again, nothing new here but the flatness had an impact when filming in 360, there was one location where I walked away from the camera for about a minute and still couldn’t get out of the shot easily.
360 film-making is awkward
The images produced by the Theta V are generally great even in the forest with a wide range of tones the camera coped and produced interesting images with highlights and shadows that contain detail. For me I don’t like the workflow, connecting to a smartphone is unreliable and when trying to use it ‘headless’ the LED lights on the device are hard to see in bright light (I ended up with a lot of shots of me staring gormlessly at the camera.
Is it recording?Is it even on?
360 film-making needs a new approach
It was really hard to conceptualise the framing of a shot that doesn’t have a frame. Like a number of the projects this year I found myself having to try to forget the approaches that have worked for me in the past, the concept of a subject is fundamentally different when you can’t direct a viewers eye. I found it useful to try and think of it as 2 cameras filming with very wide lenses. Did each of the cameras include something of visual interest that would still be interesting given the extreme wide angle.
Not so interestingIf in doubt put it in the subject not by it
A few months ago I came across an article reviewing a book about the architect Peter Zumthor. In it there is a mention of an idea that “landscapes are historical documents.” The idea caught my interest so I saved the link but went back to what I was working on at the time.
As I mentioned in my post about Bauhaus, although I have never studied architecture formally a number of ideas from the field have had strong influences on my other work.
Once I began to explore the idea further I realised this was a concept explored across history, archeology, anthropology, the list goes on. I was reminded of just how small my knowledge is compared to the entirety of human learning and discussion. Here is a concept close to many ideas that I have been interested in for many years that I have never encountered.
Didn’t you study geology?
This seems even more profoundly strange when put in context that I studied Geology for a number of years and learnt to read landscapes, rocks, and strata as a document of geological time, and physical processes and activity. Detailed analysis of the types, deformations and positions of rocks in a place can give us an understanding of the story of a place as it has moved across the earth, been crushed, submerged, baked, uplifted, and scoured; each layer telling a detail.
The shapes of the mountains reflect the layers of rock they are made from and also the action of the weather on the surface. Human impact is also there, some obvious, some less so.
Humans consistently modify their environments—both directly and indirectly. However, the linkage between human activity and anthropogenic landscapes intensifies in urban situations. The artificial landscapes and dense concentrations of human populations encountered in urban environments create a centripetal pull for resources that results in continual and distant landscape changes, thus inextricably linking urbanism and anthropogenic landscapes. Examining past and present patterns of urban settlement and environmental impact provides context for this symbiotic relationship. Archaeological data, methodology, and technology offer insight into the similarities and variations in urban anthropogenic landscapes across time and space, suggesting that ancient practices can be compared with contemporary ones and that ancient models may have applicability for future-focused urban planning.
The above abstract is just an example of the way that landscape as document is used. By studying landscapes the changing story of how those spaces are used, and has been used is readable.
Rolling hills covered in managed Camellia sinensis bushes. A tea plantation.
I realised during the writing of this post than none of this was completely new to me, I just hadn’t fully cemented the connections. I had encountered these ideas before when discussing landscape art with a close friend.
James Winnett has worked on a number of public art projects and installations that have responded to and been an extension of the story of the place.
James Winnett – The Cunningar Stones
As part of the project 15 large carved sculptural works were produced drawing on an extensive programme of research and community engagement which examined the complex social, industrial and natural history of the site.
James Winnett – The Cunningar Stones
James Winnett – The Rise and Fall of the Grey Mare’s Tail
A jet of white water is forced skyward from a gravity-fed fountain placed downstream of a dramatic highland waterfall. Powered entirely by the immense natural energy of water, the intervention was developed to explore a number of related themes from debates on sustainability and energy use to questions of landscape identity and representation.
James Winnett – The Rise and Fall of the Grey Mare’s Tail
James Winnett – The Lenton Priory Stone
The stone appears as a medieval artefact, the four faces functioning as chapters in the story of the site in which it stands. A series of arches above each panel depict the agricultural labours of the four seasons, interspersed with key figures who shaped the events unfolding below.
James Winnett – The Lenton Priory Stone
Winnett’s work in each of these cases is not only a representation of the story of the place but becomes part of the story of the place. As public art it designed to be a physical destination and a locus for conversation.
Each stone was recovered from the ground after being dumped there during the demolition of the Gorbals in the 1960s. Developed to reference Scottish folk carving while retaining the aesthetic of an architectural ruin, the stones act as landmarks within the landscape encouraging exploration and generating interest in the identity of the park. Each stone retains the architectural details and other marks from its history with my own carvings intervening in these layers. Many of the carvings reference the rich flora and fauna of the park.
James Winnett – The Cunningar Stones
As Winnett discusses he is interested in the way that places and objects hold their story and that his intervention becomes just one moment in that ongoing story. Similar to Duchamp’s ready mades, Winnett seems to suggest to me that there is nothing specifically superior about the contribution o the artist to the history of the object, only that they want to draw an audiences attention to the story of the object. By recontextualising an existing object as art, whether by moving it into a gallery, or by adding to its story the artist reminds us that narratives that surround our seemingly ordinary objects.
Another way to think about Poetic
This reminds me of John Akomfrah’s ideas of film preserving a moment in time. It has been interesting to contrast the Netflix natural world series Our Planet (2019. Chapman et al.) with Vertigo Sea (2015, Akonfrah). Other than the multiscreen nature of Akomfrah’s work that are similarities between the works; beautiful photography of the natural world, discussion of our human impact on the world we live in. I really enjoyed Our Planet (especially the more opinionated environmentalist angle on the narration), but with these same pieces Akomfrah is able to create something else, not just a documentary about the natural world, but a cinematic poem.
he has continued to mine the audiovisual archive of the 20th century, recontextualizing these images not only by selecting and juxtaposing them but also through the addition of eloquent and allusive text. In Memory Room 451 (1997), Akomfrah speaks of memories become dreams and vice versa. In similar fashion, his films use found footage to create cinematic poetry and then use this poetry to tell history afresh.
I started this post back in October after Ken’s Paris Report, I started to put down some thoughts based on the descriptions of the Lee Minwei piece Sonic Blossom.
Lee Mingwei discusses Sonic Blossom
I can attest that for an attentive listener the effect can be intense and powerful. I was reduced to tears after the performance and couldn’t even compose myself to thank Ms. Guan properly.
It is difficult to discuss a work like Sonic Blossom in depth without having experienced it yourself, but the above quote seems to be a common experience of those that have experienced the work, that even in a public gallery setting it is a very personal immersive experience.
Although spectators can witness someone else having the experience of Sonic Blossom, and can enjoy the beauty of the music, they are locked out of the direct gift (Lee Mingwei’s term for the song-experience). I considered this with relation to immersive cinematic experiences, whether a more experimental approach like Leviathan or a mainstream blockbuster like the latest Marvel Studios film. Advancements in cinematic technology have often been about creating a more immersive experience; sound, colour, bigger screens, 3D. Cinematic conventions seek to construct a seamless approximation of space to aid with the suspension of disbelief. I am not trying to argue that a cinematic experience is more immersive or intimate only it is a highly immersive experience that can be shared and discussed afterwards.
I came across Nicole Lazzaro a user experience designer working in games and VR discussing the way we feel as well as hearing sound. It was not something that I had thought about before but seemed obvious once it had been articulated, we feel the pressure waves of sounds as well as hearing them. In this way cinema engages with three senses not just two (I don’t think that this is true for TV).
I didn’t manage to finish this post the first time round as I had an unfinished set of ideas that I still haven’t managed to finish processing about how the immersive experience of cinema allows us to try on different Identities. I just left myself a list of notes that said:
Foucault
Giddens
Lynch and Shakespeare
World is a stage
I came back to finish off this post because in developing an approach for the 360 video poetic film and the immersive trip I was reminded of the idea of presence, being there.
This would have worked better when it was timely but…
I’m sure that there is an inserting post-modern discussion to be had around the fact that I have been more interested in the discussions that have gone on around the Netflix interactive fiction show/game/experience/title Bandersnatch (2018).
New Years novelty, the future of TV, or something else?
Personally my wife and I had an enjoyable 90 minutes exploring the several of the paths through the narrative. There were several points in the experience where we felt the creators were one step ahead of us. As the decisions became increasingly difficult to choose between what we saw as two ‘bad’ choices we chose to not choose, this resulted in the character harming themselves. We felt morally obligated to make the right choices but there wasn’t one. We eventually reached an ending that we felt had some finality and catharsis for us, we both commented on the uniqueness of the experience. It wasn’t a TV show because we felt responsibility for the character but equally it wasn’t a game like experience because we didn’t have a clear goal that we were trying to achieve.
It would be interesting to see how much further Netflix’s interactive experiences can be pushed. Bandersnatch is clearly trying to be as accessible as possible for a mainstream audience, especially for one that is not familiar with interactive fiction games, which is why it seems to keep its interactions mostly passive.
I spent a few days thinking about the experience wondering about the 21st Century media landscape. It could be argued that the quality of TV entertainment is higher than ever, it is a refined and established medium; HBO pushed the sale of the small screen with each mini movie episode of Game of Thrones, now Netflix, Amazon, and even Apple are pouring vast sums of money into original programming. But does all this cash result in new experiences or just better looking versions of the same old stories?
Bandersnatch is listed as a 90-minute movie but, if you watch it on your computer, phone or tablet (as opposed to your TV, since most TVs aren’t equipped for the interactive experience), the actual run time can be many hours. I went down that rabbit hole and, many hours later, wondered if just watching it on my TV without the ability to manipulate the story would have been a better option.
I partly waited to post this because I wanted to see if this was a one off or wether it was the first attempt, the new experience You vs. Us. seems to suggest that more is to come.
As I have begun to experiment with the tools in Wonda VR in preparation for the Curate project I returned to thinking about the intersection of interactiveness and immersion.
Even as games experiences try to become more immersive, I recently got to try some of the new generation of VR headset gaming and it really was loose yourself immersive, there seems to be a tension between immersiveness and interactivity. When were are asked to make intellectual choices we are pulled out of the illusion of the otherworld.
View William Raban (1970)View William Raban (1970)
The above images are from View William Raban (1970) a motionless camera captures a riverbank, postproduction manipulation draws our attention to changes. In particular the changing, very British, weather seems to reflect the unpredictability of the being out in the landscape The muffled voices remind us of the film-maker standing next to the camera, this is an unromantic record of an unremarkable view.
The title, View, both draws our attention to the experience of watching the film and makes us think about the pleasure of the countryside. A ‘view’ is normally thought of in terms of a ‘good view’, but this sight is flat, muddy and foggy. Raban has said that he is not interested in the romance of the image but instead what it is to record it – he was engaged with deconstructing images and took an almost scientific approach to his work at this time – and these notions are reflected here.
Time changes the landscape, it changes places, although made in 1970 there seems to fresh relevance to this examination of the process of recording images of the landscape. For me Raban is asking us to reflect the the urge to take unremarkable snapshots of the places that we go. With the ubiquity of image making technology we can constantly create records of our path through the landscape, but are these images valuable historical documents or muted facsimiles that interrupt the creation of more romantic memories. In retelling an event that we had from memory we construct a narrative based on the ‘truth’ of our experience of the event, it is subjective, personal, and colourful, a image of the same cannot replicate this completely, does a more objective kino-eye reduce and diminish the experience. In View by manipulating time Raban seems to remind us that this is a image, recorded by a machine, breaking the illusion that it is real, he stops us from becoming immersed.
Focus II – Jenny OkunFocus II – Jenny Okun
Both a frenetic energy and a remarkable stillness seem to collide in this unusual film, shot on 16mm with a powerful telephoto lens. Artist Jenny Okun adjusts her camera and observes gentle changes in the landscape, at the same time exploring abstraction.
Jenny Okun’s films are notable for their simple yet boldly experimental qualities. In the 1970s she filmed elements of the British landscape and weather and was also interested in musical notation and sound. Today Okun works in several different mediums; not unlike this film, her drawings and sculptures appear to compress time and energy, with jagged lines and edges which simultaneously project and freeze life and movement.
Similar to Raban Okun’s film Focus II (1978) draws attention to the film-making, this time rather that post-maniputation the hand of the artist on the lens is felt in the jarring shifting focus. The otherwise still composition crashes between focus of the mossy detail on a tree branch and an obscured view of a more distant landscape, an otherwise peaceful view is render chaotic and disorienting, as a viewer we are reminded that we are not in control of this experience (unless we choose to stop watching). This lacking of control is something that is normally subtly manipulated in traditional film-making, light, composition, and focus are adjusted by the film-makers to control an audiences gaze and orchestrate a specific immersive experience. Okun seems to be challenging the idea of suspension of disbelief, we are brutally thrown around the film, very aware that we are watching a work of time-based art on a two dimensional screen.
Both of these films are causing me to question the relationship of the artists choices and the control of the viewer when considering an interactive 360 degree video. When using 360 video we give up much of the control mentioned above, the viewer chooses when and where to look, especially when viewed in a VR headset there are no frame edges for reality to leak into the viewing experience, this has the potential to be very immersive.
In Vertical (1969) David Hall approaches challenging our understanding of space through the incorporation of perspective questioning scupltures into the landscape. For me Hall’s work is arresting in the way that we are forced to think about, the space of the landscape, the artist recording it, and the fallibility of our way of seeing it.
“.. it would be a mistake to regard this film as documentation of sculpture.. It is important to realise that the sculptures only work because they are recorded on film. Their function in the film is to draw attention to the difference between our actual experience of space and the representation of three dimensions on a two dimensional surface.”
The live capture and collaboration last week resulted in an exciting day of experimentation that resulted in a project that joyfully threw away the careful development of my own movement piece. This gave me some interesting development point for future exploratory projects. Below are some of the results of combining my final movement piece with other creators Isadora stages, my stage with their movement piece, and my stage with a live pilates class.
Aaron’s Isadora stage processing my video
My Isadora stage processing Katherine’s video
Live pilates through my Isadora stage
Is was really interested in the way that the way that the result of this was a visual representation of the clash of ideas and ideologies of the artists working on the projects, often what results is much richer and more complex than I could produce on my own. To me this reflects the importance of having a plurality and diversity of voices in social discourse, the result can be more subtle, vibrant, and inclusive. To celebrate the results of this collaboration I create an edit that brings together these experiments with a modified version of the track that I created to accompany my movement piece.
As I noted at the start of this project the original footage that I captured for this project was only intended to be a test but became an important part of the experimental process the I adopted for this project. The dancer had originally performed without any music so thew only sound that I had was that picked up by the cameras internal mic.
Listening to the sounds repeated whilst working in Isadora I became interested in incorporating these accidental sounds the way that I had the images and created a number of loops from the sounds of the dancers breathing and joints, and our communication before and after the dance.
Short loop created from the dancer’s breathing and joints clicking
What the mic capture after the camera roles
I used a series of phasing and layering techniques that I have experimented with over the course of the year to develop a layered soundscape that mirrored the looping evolving aspect of the visuals.
After screening the the piece to a number of groups I became aware that the I wanted to add some kind of musical elements to add texture and also introduce a more harmonious, positive aspect. I had been listening to Jon Hopkins and picked up a the texture of quickly repeating notes in a number of tracks that seemed to blend into a single sound. I created a simple approximation of this using two stock synth sounds in Garageband and repeating the same notes as quickly as I could. I wanted to do do this manually rather than looping the note because I wanted the texture of the sound to contrast with the digital looping of the images and other sounds.
I layered this back over the existing vocal and distorted breathing loops to create the version of the track that was used during Isadora Live capture sessions.
Track3 is the synth sounds with additional layers Chorus applied, this is panned back and forth across the soundstage to create spaceThe synth sounds are mixed low in the mix so that they don’t overwhelm the other aspects.
During those sessions I felt that the track ended too abruptly to work as a piece that would be used on its own with the visuals so I added a swell to the end of the track that could be used with an edit of the footage captured during the Live sessions.
Track Bounce_6 creates a swell in the synth track that helps to create a sense of resolution at the end of the 2 minutes
mattprentice 
