today i will write a poem for us.

 My main focuses for sounds were: 

• wind (such as whistling, blowing into an empty bottle,

blowing into my palm, breathing)

• train (metal against glass for the train track vibration,

dropping announcement, train woosh)

• birds (a mix of both seaguls and chickens)

(because Jack lives in Norfolk and everyone has to have chickens there)

• paper (opening a notebook, running fingers over a piece of paper,

scrunching up paper, throwing paper into the air, paper falling)

• writing (opening and closing a pen, writing in different paces)

I also had to improvise because I didn't have a dead cat

or any other microphone cover..

After that, I created a timeline for all that was happening within the piece.

Birds in the sky. Light wind. Train station.
People kicking stones in front of the station.

Metallic sound/vibration of the train tracks where a train is approaching.

The train goes past. There is a person standing at the station.

Announcement rings through the small station, wind flows through the gaps.
The person opens the little folder in their hands and pops off the pen lid with their mouth.
They scribble something whilst looking up at the view instead of the paper.
They look down and tear the paper into two, scrunching it up and throwing it away.
They write something again, this time paying attention. As they write, the wind picks up.
It whistles and gets noisy. The paper flies up and is taken away by the gust.

I ended up with eleven tracks overall. Right before the export I came across a problem in the playback after unplugging my headphones. Detected dropped samples. There would be a very short jump in the audio but when exported, it would disappear. I tried to find the solution within Audition but couldn't, so that's something I have to look into because it really confused me.

This is the final outcome.

with a heavy heart.

I am obsessed with the way this description of a human centrifuge has been written. I find it so easy to feel the words:

it’s hard to explain exactly how it feels inside a human centrifuge. you sit in a small egg-like pod about the size of a horse which hangs off a 50 foot steel horizontal frame. It looks like something out of a bond villain’s lair. it’s claustrophobic and uncomfortable and also incredibly hot.

slowly the whole thing starts to rotate like a helicopter blade. Faster and faster until every part of you becomes crushed under the extreme gravity. its like being slowly sat on by an elephant, or like your whole body being punched in slow motion. you have to flex every muscle and use every ounce of strength you have to keep going. breathing requires serious effort. movement becomes incredibly strained and almost painful. everything that once weighed 5 kilograms now weighs 50. its difficult even to keep your eyes open. it hurts in places you really didn’t know existed. veins and capillaries burst under the pressure and bruising begins. its a rapid physical overdrive.

the blood rushes from your brain making it impossible to think rationally or focus. your eyes are also drained and you get tunnel vision…only able to see small circles of the world directly in front of you and your sight goes completely greyscale…no more colour. your balance and spatial awareness goes and the world begins to spin like you’ve had way too much to drink. but the most striking thing is the way that the machine pulls on your heart. you can actually feel it struggling to beat and changing shape…flattening inside of your chest. Its similar to that horrible sinking, tugging heartache that comes only with complete and overwhelming sadness. and then you pass out.

we ran the centrifuge 18 times while i tried to sing along to a song which i find difficult to listen to at the best of times.

This is my current inspiration. At the start of this project I really wanted to explore lightness, softness, bliss and the unconscious but I soon realised that it was just something too much in my comfort zone. My visual poems always tend to lean towards the common sense of beauty. However, reading this I realised that the being human is also about a sense of sickness, a pain in fact inflicted by something beautiful.

the journey to mount fuji.

The beginning: Hokusai

Hokusai developed late as an artist and started the series at the age of 70, drawing, printing and cutting wood blocks for publishers and other artists prior to that. At the age of seventy-five he said about himself: “I have drawn things since I was six. All that I made before the age of sixty-five is not worth counting. At seventy-three I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. At ninety I will enter into the secret of things. At a hundred I shall certainly have reached a magnificent level; and when I am a hundred and ten, everything-every dot, every dash — will live.”

Thirty-six View of Mount Fuji strikes the viewer with its diversity of compositions and scenes that seem never to repeat each other. The series includes close-up views of the sacred mountain where it appears alone in its majesty depicted throughout the seasons and weather conditions; as well as distant (and very distant) views where it rather serves as a constant for every-day life scenes.

The middle: Wall

After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue 1999-2000 

Wall describes his work as “cinematographic” re-creations of everyday moments he has witnessed, but did not photograph at the time. “To not photograph,” he says, “gives a certain freedom to then re-create or reshape what I saw.” [..] In his new show, you will search in vain for anything as spectacularly hyperreal as A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai)1993, a huge digital collage in which four figures in a landscape respond to a sudden squall that bends trees and scatters a sheaf of papers though the air. Today, most of his images resemble reportage and, as such, are likely to incense his detractors, who claim he’s not a “true” photographer.

The approach: The World Spins, The Convenience Store, Welcome to Night Vale, Paterson

I find it hard to visualise a soundscape without a story holding it up, hence why my main goal straight after choosing an image was to come up with a visual journey that I could then imagine within sound. Thankfully I came across a film called Paterson by Jim Jarmusch that really helped me find a solid starting point. This film is about a bus driver in a town called Paterson (his name is also Paterson) who has a passion for poetry. This film is lovely because it isn't based around dialogues and instead focuses on either listening to the speech of others, or talking to oneself. 

Anyhow, I found the journey of the film to be the fuel to make the wheels start turning within my head. I started at the beginning - the original piece of art done by Hokusai that focused on different views of Mount Fuji and based it on this location (more so in an abstract way - I decided this would be the perfect place of inspiration my person would go to to feel peaceful). As both the painting and the photograph focus so much on the aftermath of this gust of wind, I thought it would be nice to actually think about what happened before hand. 

I spent a lot of time just focusing on listening. The very top video is a piece of soundtrack from the original Twin Peaks that perfectly portrays the feelings of sadness, loss and ending, at least in my mind. It's peaceful but strong, something that really pulls at you but quietly so.

On the other hand, the second soundscape is drastically different. It's chaotic, loud and piercing; it's an interrupted story - almost as if it was broken and then glued back together. It's very unpleasant to listen to but it pushes further what we see visually.

Then lastly I thought I'd add something completely unrelated but fascinating - a podcast that focuses on a radio show in a fictional place. This made me realise just how much small details of description and noise can do to establish a mental image of what something looks like when there is no imagery to base this view on.


BIBLIOGRAPHY:

[1]  Kira Sidorova (2010) Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji from the Met for your enjoyment. 

At: http://www.galleryintell.com/thirty-six-views-mount-fuji/(Accessed on 14/2/18)

[2]  Sean O'Hagan (2015) Jeff Wall: 'I'm haunted by the idea that my photography was all a big mistake'. At: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/nov/03/jeff-wall-photography-marian-goodman-gallery-show (Accessed on 16/2/18)

windy.

The spontaneous is the most beautiful thing that can appear in a picture, but nothing in art appears less spontaneous than that.

I decided to go against what felt right. Out of all the images we were offered, I decided to purposefully choose the one that I liked visually but knew would have trouble conceptualising.

The other images were very packed with almost explosive visual sounds but A Sudden Gust of Wind really spoke to me in its style - faint, blush, pastel colours, the idea of a painted event becoming reality, the film-likeness of it, the seeming possibility of a single person being in multiple places, thereby creating a movement within a still. I could imagine the quiet breeze and softness of sound it could bring. It was a contrast to the intensity of the other paintings.

Ejiri in Suruga Province was one of Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

I like the thought behind Jeff Wall's image. It's a recreation, it's a beautiful serendipity but it's fully staged. It's sort of like a copy. It was a real moment turned into a drawing that then got recreated and frozen in time through an image. 

First notes:

sounds of paper,

whistle and chimes moving in wind, 

river and flow of water

To me wind and rain are escape, paper is creation and water is meditation. 

Recently I watched Jim Jarmusch's Paterson. It's a film about a bus driver who is also a poet. He starts his day writing, then listens to people chat on the bus, and then at lunch he goes to his favourite place - a waterfall - and keeps writing. 

For some reason that's exactly what I envision in this photograph. A journey in writing, if that makes sense. I realise it might be a strange approach but I've created a story that I want to create the soundscape for. I know what I want visually, so now I need to produce that within sound.

us and [sr].

< when i was twelve
i had to choose between german and russian
my dad told me to do russian because then he could help me with the homework

i was confused as to why he knew the language so well
but when he was a child, russian was our country's language

see, my sister was born in 1990,

a year after the baltic chain of freedom

but a year before the fall of ussr.

she was born in soviet union

and i was born in latvia,

only a seven year difference.

i was born in a free country

childishly i was unaware

that nothing in life is as easy as it seems, and that when i grow up
hearing latvian on a street would become almost unusual.

most of my friends fell in love with travelling,

they moved, and so did i,

and what's left now is the generation who fought for our freedom

left to watch it disappear. >

m.

As the title suggests, I find it very hard to explain what I did in this little video. I had a whole vision of a strange video I wanted to shoot but I've now decided to keep it for later as last week didn't really go as well as I hoped it would. Nevertheless, I filmed some shots and went crazy on Premiere Pro. This includes using warp and twirl distortions, color keying colours that really should've remained untouched, using multiple layers, timelapse and RGB curves on top of two still images and five shots of clouds, Jack under a huge blanket and a close-up of a guitar amp.

A week and a half ago I also decided to go a bit crazy with the live music footage we recorded. Although it started as me just playing with editing tools, I soon realised that I actually quite liked the low, grainy quality of bad color keying and multiple, colourful layers. I might come back to that again.

The video beneath is one I did a very long time ago for a poem that I wrote, however the shots following the one minute fourty four second mark are some of my favourites as they are more abstract and unusual than the rest of the milk/honey/ink visuals. I like textures, both of the subject filmed and the actual digital outcome after editing, so I might bring that into some of the other experimental shorts to follow.

test pattern.

Derek Jarman's Blue (1993) is a 75 minute 35mm film that consists of a single static shot of the colour blue with voiceover written by Jarman himself. 

In Derek Jarman’s last film Blue, the monochrome glow of the projected frame echoes the artist’s fading eyesight, as the soundtrack evokes powerful images of the mental, physical and emotional strain caused by his terminal illness. Blue was completed in 1993, the year before Jarman succumbed to AIDS-related complications. [1] 

It features a variety of voices by actors including Tilda Swinton and musicians such as Brian Eno and Tony Hinnigan. The film's single colour was inspired by Jarman's visit to Tate where he found a monochrome painting by Yves Klein, hence the usage of 'International Klein Blue' pigment solution. This colour is described to be the experience of the journey from reality to the beyond.

The script, recited by actors and by Jarman himself, alternates poetry and narrative prose around different meanings and interpretations of the colour blue (melancholy, water, infinity, etc.), autobiographical episodes and invocations to a character called Blue. [1]

*

Ryoji Ikeda is a Japanese artist and composer who currently lives in Paris. His test pattern project began in 2006, and his most recent one [N°12] was shown at The Store in The Strand last year. Above is test pattern [N°5]. In this test pattern Ikeda converts data into binary patterns that are generated in real-time, thereby submerging the viewer into a confusing, strange and chaotic environment that benefits greatly from the sound design. Loud, ear-piercing noises and long periods of silence don't allow the viewer to settle for a moment.

Probing the essential characteristics of sound and light, Ikeda’s work bridges the worlds of art and music and challenges fundamental preconceptions of both through the intensity of his installations. [2]

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

[1]  Derek Jarman: Blue. At: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/display/derek-jarman-blue (Accessed on 18/2/18)

[2] Anton Spice (2017) Ryoji Ikeda premieres mind-bending new A/V artwork test pattern [N°12] at Store Studios. At: https://thevinylfactory.com/news/ryoji-ikeda-new-test-pattern-n12-store-studios/ (Accessed on 20/2/18)

blues

A timelapse of an empty day going by.
(this is edit number two. edit one is here)

I don't think this was a successful attempt at working with time, mostly because my mind went blank and the only idea within it was a timelapse. I like timelapses because of the fluid way the image changes, and the fact that when you start, you don't know what you're going to end up with.

The timelapse in this video is reversed and consists of 45 minutes of footage sped up by 5000 percent. It's also reversed, and as my camera recorded it into four different files, I slowed each file down by 4 frames using Premiere Pro's 'Posterize Time' to interrupt this flow of time that the smooth timelapse created. The very start of this video is a very strange scene I happened to wander upon with multiple large lights turning on and off constantly for about ten minutes, which I thought was quite hypnotising.

The audio was a short journey between Charing Cross and Embankment on the underground, lasting fourty seven seconds (recorded on a Zoom and with a hallway reverb)

[..] but the most striking thing is the way that the machine pulls on your heart. you can actually feel it struggling to beat and changing shape…flattening inside of your chest. Its similar to that horrible sinking, tugging heartache that comes only with complete and overwhelming sadness. and then you pass out.

This is one of the heaviest videos I've seen in a while and it's not necessarily what it looks like - it's where it takes place and what it symbolises. Filmed inside a human centrifuge, they ran it eighteen times to get the lead singer to perform the whole of the song. His facial expressions change and the sweat on his forehead tells about the intensity of the experience. It is so strange to watch that I still haven't figured out exactly how it was recorded and edited. I just thought this was a fascinating video to do with time, movement and sense of heaviness.

In recent mainstream films one of my favourite uses of time was actually in Dunkirk. They used three different timelines, counting down to the main event: a week, a day, an hour and they took place in three different areas: air, sea and land.

These locations and times created a sort of a triptych - three unlinked pathways that all lead up to the big revelation. I found it amazing how the film changed between the times, relying on the spectator to keep up with what storyline they were following at that particular time. Needless to say, it was also the beautiful camerawork from Nolan and van Hoytema that played with the feeling of time, silence and chaos.