For this project, I used some video that Brett and I shot when we were driving from out to California several years ago. I wrote the music to go along with it, and the process seemed to fix the memories in a new way.
Most of the audio was composed beforehand, but the video was performed live using a patch written in Puredata and Gem.
This is really documentation of an ephemeral project, as opposed to a document in itself. The project culminated as a performance where I mixed the video live using the midi keyboard seen in the opening frames; I also hooked my rig up to a small television and made viewers crowd around it instead of using a larger projection screen. As you can imagine, the result was quite different experience than the one you see here.
For a class assignment on synesthesia, I decided to build something to turn a video input into sound. This was in some ways a culmination of a several interactions I created with the clear purpose of being counter-intuitive. In this case, the video camera provides the material to be translated into sound, but it’s set up such that only moving sections of video will result in nonzero samples: the video output being scanned is seen on the television in the background. At the same time, a wii remote is used to control the rate that the pixels are being scanned, which adds some gross control of pitch. The two simultaneous interactions are sometimes at odds with each other.
I set this up for my classmates and let them try it out, which added the element of physical performance. Afterwards, my professor asked me, “Where is the piece?” or, in other words, where should we be looking? At the screen or at the person gesticulating wildly? I didn’t have an answer: later I realized that I was pleased with the ambiguity.