Wednesday I went out with Mont and Christian to Fog Lane Park in Didsbury, where we worked on Mont’s super-positioning project again. This time we walked to opposite ends of one of the fields and shot each other at a distance with and without zoom and using our phones to exchange directions, so that each video view of one person has the voice of the other accompanying it. As a space-piece it seemed to work well, with unaccounted for elements like a woman jogging laps that would pass behind Mont and then 5 minutes later infront of Christian and I. Bought a wedge of heavily oxidized, earthy smelling cheese from the Cheese Hamlet on the way back, which I realise now I’ve yet to eat.
Thursday Kay and Marcin had their first video club thing in the studio. I thought it was pretty good though their choice of Derek Jarman’s “Blue” seemed baffling to the majority of those who watched, which is fair enough when none of the group bar Marcin and I had ever seen another Jarman film and would therefore have no frame of reference for the style and content. Hardly the most accessible of the Jarman canon in any case. It was enjoyable though and made me feel just that little bit closer to experiencing something of that “art school” thing people dream of so...
Discovery of the week (at least) has to be Cinema 4D, a CGI modelling/animation programme shown to me by Mont’s Derby friend Joe. Mont’s using it to model for an upcoming show at Blank Media but the process looks like fun so I’m going to attempt to download it at his house later on. It’d be the perfect solution to my video/sound re-direction - CGI imagery/movement with hissy reel to reel sound? Severed Heads as fuck, potentially. More on this later...
Yesterday I was thinking about Kay and Marcin’s video club again and the possibility of me showing re-soundtracked videos as a pre-film extra. For example the 22 minute film “The River Clyde” from the “Seawards The Great Ships” DVD coupled with Coil’s “Remote Viewing Part 3”, or “Glasgow’s Docklands” from the same DVD with Nurse With Wound’s “Dirty Fingernails”. Anyway, thinking along these lines I put on a library copy of Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook Of The North” and decided on a soundtrack of the Psychic TV “Electric Newspaper” compilation albums. As the synthesis of video and sound seemed so inkeeping with the Burroughs/P-Orridge etc. cut-up tradition I set about expanding the idea and put together a potential flyer/poster for the work, were it ever to be shown. The idea for the work at this point is for a double showing of Nanook set to issues one and two of the Electric Newspaper series, with two gap-filling insertions of sections of the 25 minute “Iron Pyrites” track, used previously in a different edit on the Derek Jarman Super 8 film of William Burroughs in London, the name of which escapes me at this moment. As the piece as planned will play for 157 minutes, it is not intended to be a sit-down-and-watch-from-beginning-to-end work, so the perfect place for it to be shown really is not the video club but the Link Gallery. It then becomes a work that people catch snippets of as they walk through and this is the way it works best. Obviously some parts won’t work as well as others and the sound will not sit comfortably with the visuals. At other points however the viewer may be pleasantly surprised with the merging of the two elements, perhaps even tricked or confused as I have felt for those interesting flashes of time where the subconscious is quicker to react than the mind and one starts to check the DVD player volume to make sure it is the new soundtrack that fits so well and not the original one creeping into the mix. See the end of this week’s write up for my current design for a poster to grace the doors at either end of the Link and promote the showing of the work around the university, along with a visual aid to the combination of video and sound. Some might say the work isn’t that great but then what work that’s ever shown there is?
Finally, last night I played about somemore with the Rode Mic, using the length of the wire to advantage and having it tripod-mounted in the kitchen. I’d then listen to the sounds of the kitchen on the stereo in my bedroom. Took this to another level by concealing it in a cardboard poster tube and putting it out on the window ledge in the hope that I’d finally be able to record the pidgeons in the morning. I listened to the sounds of Wilmslow Road amplified through the stereo until I went to sleep and woke at 15:33 to no pidgeons. Perhaps I slept through them or perhaps they never came. Must now spend the week recording for my new archive and experimenting further with recording positions and methods...
Below: Top - Poster design for R.U.Xperienced?
Bottom - Video/Sound Arrangement
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