One of the things going on is that I have a new video work that is out and about, currently awaiting replies from various venues. Film of Sound is a 10 minute video I made with Australian sound artist Roger Dean and writer Hazel Smith, a creative duo and founders of Australysis.

It was performed in Sydney last December (12/10/11) at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music with 4-channel audio and a double-projection screen. The center of the audio space–the sweet spot– was the surface of the screen.

Here are two excerpts.

Film of Sound is a semiotic surface, a skin of image and text on the body of sound. Constructed out of collaborative, indeterminate and remix processes, layers and juxtapositions of disparate media hint at a narrative trajectory — a sleeping man, an evening in a hotel room, and a journey across vast and challenging spaces. But the incipient narrative constantly breaks down into disordered memories of violence and repression, undefined threats, splintered subjectivities, analog and digital glitches.

10 minute, single channel video
Artists: Roger Dean, Will Luers and Hazel Smith
an australLYSIS commission

Electronic art video and interactive works generally prioritize image over sound, this is also the case in commercial culture at large. For this work, we chose a different approach, in keeping with the central focus of the commissioning ensemble, austraLYSIS. That focus is sound : musical, spoken, electroacoustic and environmental. In Film of Sound sound was chosen to be the initiator, sometimes even driver, of the text and visual processes at work in the piece. Three collaborators were involved, respectively with focus on the video composition (Luers), the text composition (Smith) and the sonic composition (Dean). In the first stage of creating the piece, a pair of sound compositions were made by Dean, and Luers and Smith began generating responses to them. After considerable exchange of materials, an overall plan for one imagistic narrative layer, to be constructed first in sound, was agreed. After the drafted sound layer was produced, all the ongoing text- and video- generation processes joined into an iterative amalgamation, interaction, and refinement sequence.

The result reveals at least two continuous narrative and process layers. There are ideas about the continuation of physical objects and processes — such as the life of the ocean — despite the termination of life. These ideas swirl with and against questions of language, the communicative powers of humans, and the resilience of human engagement even when resources and opportunities seemingly diminish.

Through the interweaving of text, sound and image —sometimes complementary, sometimes antithetical — the work explores a number of continua from the pre-verbal to the articulated, from the glimpse to the gaze, from noise to music. It also simultaneously projects both rapidly transforming affective intensities and sustained emotional states.

- Roger Dean, Will Luers and Hazel Smith

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Khing, the master carver, made a bell stand
Of precious wood. When it was finished,
All who saw it were astounded. They said it must be
The work of spirits.
The Prince of Lu said to the master carver:
“What is your secret?”

Khing replied: “I am only a workman:
I have no secret. There is only this:
When I began to think about the work you commanded
I guarded my spirit, did not expend it
On trifles, that were not to the point.
I fasted in order to set
My heart at rest.
After three days fasting,
I had forgotten gain and success.
After five days
I had forgotten praise or criticism.
After seven days
I had forgotten my body
With all its limbs.

“By this time all thought of your Highness
And of the court had faded away.
All that might distract me from the work
Had vanished.
I was collected in the single thought
Of the bell stand.

“Then I went to the forest
To see the trees in their own natural state.
When the right tree appeared before my eyes,
The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond doubt.
All I had to do was to put forth my hand
and begin.

“If I had not met this particular tree
There would have been
No bell stand at all.

“What happened?
My own collected thought
Encountered the hidden potential in the wood;
From this live encounter came the work
Which you ascribe to the spirits.”

- Chuang Tzu
from The Way of Chuang Tzu by Thomas Merton

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