Photo & Video / /
Though all arts involve some amount science and all sciences involve some amount of art, there are places where the sciences and arts interact with uncommon intimacy. These points of convergence are especially interesting as, I believe, they point towards larger themes of interconnectedness between the humanities. Whether they be a specific piece like Alvin Lucier’s I’m Sitting In A Room—a piece that, like a record in an academic journal, seems to invite the listener to replicate the experiment—or an entire art form like Photography— whose process is consumed with chemistry and lens optics but with an often purely aesthetic result.
A test that I made while brainstorming ideas for a music video (below) to my song “The Waters Below”.
First, using Andrew Benson’s Jitter recipe 06: Dancing Sprites and the isolated vocals of a demo I had recently recorded, I modulated the clouds of the photo of Mont Veyrier above by the amplitude of the vocals. Then I modulated the result by the amplitude of the whole track using Benson’s recipe 52: DirtySignal.
The resulting music video of the above testing.
The footage—meant to be my version of the danse macabre—was filmed on a warm August evening in 2017 in a small flat off of Roseneath Terrace by Helin Raudsepp & Jarvis Gray. Then I added the glitch effects with programming I made with Jitter.
A project of similar vein, and actually more a direct continuation of the first test.
I used a photo that I took of the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon, and cut it up into components (filling in the background with the beautifully textured colors with Photoshop's 'content aware fill'). I then added a green screen background to those components and attached them to different isolated instruments from the song’s stems. I then used the same Jitter patch from The Waters Below to glitch the layers, keyed out the greenscreen in After Effects, and lined them all up again.