Relentless Spasms of Restrained Serenity
2011
Fixed-media video and sound
Exhibited:
Electroacoustic Barn Dance Festival, University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, VA, 2012
Electronic Music Midwest, Kansas City Kansas Community College, Kansas City, Kansas, 2013
Relentless Spasms of Restrained Serenity is a multimedia collage of found sound and found video. In my collages, I meld samples together to create new and unique entities - gestalts. Hundreds of sound and video clips are churned together, each providing their own distinct identity. The exact quality of every recording - the hiss, the static, the color - is kept intact. The samples represent exactly themselves, snippets of recorded media, no more and no less. A video sample is not a direct reference to the subject material. It contains within it the subject material, but it also contains all of the minutia of recording - the perspective (physical and cultural) of the author, the equipment, and the uniqueness of the conditions of the recording, with the arm positioned exactly thus, or the singer holding the note for an extra 1/100th of a second. All of these details comprise the character of the sample, and the amalgamation of these characters can be startling and beautiful. Yet, at the same time, they also often overwhelm me with nostalgia that I have trouble explaining.
Created with After Effects and Sonar