"And there I left him tranced."
This competition's theme was Trance, and required audio as a main focus
Audio was something I'd not had a lot of experience with, but took on the challenge, I asked a friend to record some short guitar clips I could use, and set about sorting samples I had collected and constructing a base for the audiovisual piece. Through some of the samples I already had I rediscovered "The City" a 1939 film "On the need for town planning" I used databending techniques to produce visual artifacts in clips that associated with some of the samples I had taken from the audio. Combined with photographs of projected slides I had created, created the audiovisual bricolage effect I wanted.
"Audiovisual Bricolage - to en-Trance, Fragments ; Trance (third-person singular simple present trances, present participle trancing, simple past and past participle tranced) 1. (transitive, intransitive) To (cause to) be in a trance; to entrance. 2. (transitive, rare) To create in or via a trance. "
| This piece was created for The Orphanage's sixth Non-Fungible Thunderdome Art Contest. | 01:33 | 1920x1080 | Audio: collected samples; tones, noise generated by artist. Visual: photographs and samples from "The City" 1939 (National Archives Identifier: 89849) Source: https://youtu.be/iGL1jZ4Zxv8 |
Internal Chaos of a Calm Exterior
This weeks theme was Meditation and required object was Water
For this week, I had an idea almost immediately and sketched out a very brief storyboard to keep the idea fresh for the next morning. I couldn't sleep that night so got up at about 3am and started shooting the Budda elements of the animation. This took me up to just before sunrise, at which point I took my camera, and Tascam microphone out and down to the sea. Along the way I recorded birdsong, and at the beach I shot the rest of the frames for the animation and recorded the sounds of the waves. When I got home I started straight on creating the assets for the final animation, and then compiled the film and edited the audio.
Trouble ripples on the edge of consciousness, Nirvana begins again before the end. | This piece was created for The Orphanage's second Non-Fungible Thunderdome Art Contest. | 00:36 | 1620x1080 | Audio recorded by artist |
This piece came third in the contest, my first podium position in any contest I have entered.
The Firmament of Perseverance.
This week was more complicated, there was no required object to neatly narrow the focus of my thinking, and the theme was 'Omniscient Eye'. I turned to the Bible for passages to try to narrow the focus into a smaller arena. I got my typewriter working and created some typed pages to use as physical assets. I projected the image of The Helix Nebula (The God's Eye Galaxy), and a slide through a slide projector on top of physical assets. The guest judge was @missingwatcher who uses morse code in some of his work, so I decided to generate some morse code sounds of 'Omniscient Eye' and a passage from Job (28:23). This was a much less coherant animation from my point of view, however I am still very pleased with the result.
Through the eye of a galaxy, the tendrils of the firmament reach out towards omniscience. | This piece was created for The Orphanage's third Non-Fungible Thunderdome Art Contest. | 00:19 | 1920x1080 | Audio recorded/generated by artist |
* * *
Animations
He's Rising
"He's Rising" was inspired by William Kentridge, and his work "Second Hand Reading". This work is my first on-chain animation, I am hoping that it will serve as a launching off point for the further development of this frame animation, dictionary page idea.
He's Rising was my first NFT 'mint' on Hic et Nunc, it has sold two editions, and I have burned four from the original ten copies. It is OBJKT No. 54604. The OBJKT is the token code produced in the 'minting' process, where the NFT is created by the Hic et Nunc OBJKTMINT smart contract.
OBJKT No. 54604 www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/54604
Hic et Nunc dapp better-call.dev/dapps/hen
Hic et Nunc OBJKTs Contract better-call.dev/mainnet/KT1RJ6PbjHpwc3M5rw5s2Nbmefwbuwbdxton/operations
Hic et Nunc OBJKT Mintery/Swap Protocol better-call.dev/mainnet/KT1Hkg5qeNhfwpKW4fXvq7HGZB9z2EnmCCA9/operations
* * *
Projected - Skylit Icons
This was my first experiment in projecting a photograph on top of existing material and adding to it
A Handbook Map of Switzerland
A Fanatic Farmer Farmed
These are like 'variations on a theme', both heavily inspired by William Kentridge - Second Hand Reading, which I saw in the Whitworth Art gallery in Manchester, England.
I found the idea of using a book like a dictionary - in this case a French-English dictionary - as a paper medium interesting, and combined the idea with a generative alliterative poetic process using the dictionary pages at hand as the word generation corpus.
* * *
Works in Progress
To start in the middle is to journey outwards to the boundaries to find the arena within which the ideas reside. To create a bounding box, drawing the lines around the edges too soon precludes an exploration of the area to construct the arena.
* * *
I have supported and promoted this photographic work through Twitter and Discord.