STRATIC show at Dome of Visions in Stockholm, Sweden.
STRATIC / Strata on show at Dome of Visions in Stockholm, Sweden. Fragmented “digital painting” projections on the snow and illumination of the dome.
S T R A T I C project
The STRATIC project explores the interplay of the sensory actuation in interactive media expression and the aesthetic properties of analog/digital transformations engendered by the limitations and qualities of various forms of sensing apparatus. The result takes the form of noisy and hypnotic soundscapes linked to an abstract animation. The abstract animation is directly generated from the sound.
This STRATIC project is based on the phenomenon that occurs when filming a pulsating light – lines appear on the screen. This phenomenon is produced without any additional computational processes incorporated as the phenomenon happens inside the camera between the pulsation of RGB LED light and the use of the shutter speed and frame rate of a camera. In other words, the sound generates the visuals in real-time. The sound is generated digitally and controlled through the digital interface in processing software and then sent to a circuit board.
Thus, the thickness and movement of these lines are directly related to the frequency of the sound and of the pulsation of the light in relation to the sampling rate of the camera. In this project, we explore the interactive potential and the space for aesthetic expression by synthesizing the audio and the visuals.
Project Background
The project is grounded in a form of aesthetics referred to in the art tradition as “avant-garde cinema”. The visual music genre originated at the beginning of XX century with silent films in which sound was directly translated into a related visual presentation. In particular, abstract films with their avant-garde experiments, such as Walter Ruttmann’s “Opus” series (1921–1925) in which he uses the film medium to expand formalist artistic expression. In Opus, Ruttmann uses analog film materials to express the dynamics of abstract graphic elements, which are accompanied by music, creating a synchronized audio-visual journey. In Opus IV (1925), it bears a resemblance to the STRATIC of its horizontal moving lines.
This project also relates to the futurist art movement of noise music promoting aesthetics that draw directly on machines and their processes. This, in turn, relates to the glitch as an artistic resource and might be perceived in relation to the separation of glitches into fault aesthetics and glitch aesthetics. This is connected to how Italian futurist composer Luigi Russolo (1883–1947) embraced the aesthetics of noises created by machines and used them for artistic expression by tuning the noises into a polyphony of an “intoxicating orchestra of noises”. His definition of noise is broad and ever-growing as new machines continuously give rise to new forms of noise.
We find interesting parallels between the Modernist tradition and digital culture and its relationship to the post digital. On the one hand, the importance to the whole post-digital condition with references between the old and new though, on the other hand, important steps towards the historical foundation of the glitch with the futurist noise approach. The glitch is directly derived from the early art experiments, for example, Magnet TV (1965) by Nam June Paik video artwork, or examples of early avant-garde film editing techniques such as the Soviet Montage Theory of Sergei Eisenstein through formalist and futurist approaches. However, in this work, of course, we align with the digital glitch, which manifests via digital means and is being introduced as a resource for post-digital expression.
Artist Vygandas Simbelis / Das Vegas.
