Abstract:
The Amplified Experience is a research project centered on constructing universal experiences through the use of co-operating sound and video in the form of large-scale multi-projection installations, and individual sound and video works. The Amplified Experience focuses on the characteristics, structures, phenomena and processing of sound, and on video imagery. Within the field of contemporary sound, analogue inputs are returning alongside digital technologies. Both technologies can produce rudimentary forms of sound and more varied complex phenomena such as pure tone1, noise, feedback and glitches2. My research involves the connection of this form of sound with video imagery. Within my artwork these mediums converge and then co-operate. These kinds of combinations – the scale, contextualising of environment and the volume – play an important role in finding potential extremes and limits for audiences. Structural concepts relating to duration and sequence are addressed through the exploration of repetition, computersequenced forms and improvisation. Aspects of formal music composition (such as tempo, rhythm, tone, phrasing, harmony and dissonance) also act as a model for organisation. In the short video documentary, The Many Moods of Otomo Yoshihide, Japanese sound artist and musician Otomo Yoshihide describes his expansive practice as being “in between categories”. This notion of being in between categories, namely art and music and their many sub-categories, is the position my artwork operates from in the production ofThe Amplified Experience. This position allows my practice to drift between both doctrines of fine art and music by creating artwork that can operate both in an art gallery and music performance arenas, i.e. as large-scale audiovisual installations within the context of an exhibition space, and live performances and publications of sound and video artworks. The position of ‘being in between’ allows greater media diversity and the creation of new artwork combining art and music concepts and methodologies. The studio-based research towards The Amplified Experience was primarily located within a technological context where current and obsolete mediums merge, and involved combining analogue and digital mediums with custom-designed hardware such as the AV5-Error video distortion device3. Conceptually the work created within The Amplified Experience research project is derived from the aim to create a sonic and visual experience through repetition of sound, colour and looped video. The artwork seeks to potentially remove and isolate a given audience from the rigours of everyday existence by offering a sensory space for a viewer to ‘step off’ and drift into. It is my intention to encourage an open interpretation of the artwork where memory, reflection and physical awareness play freely. Within this supporting documentation I will discuss content, tests, failures and successful realisations of artwork produced in The Amplified Experience project (2006-2010). My research for the project has been divided into three symbiotic chapters that are titled Sound, Reductive Video and Abstract Video. The topics discussed in Sound are primary elements or starting points in the development of the video artworks in this project. Sound compositions consist of minimal arrangements of types of sound as the basis for the generation and production of video artworks. Reductive Video discusses the initial video and sound works made for The Amplified Experience. These dealt with the concept of extracting and repeating a small fragment of time to reduce and subsequently amplify the subject matter from its original context. The techniques and strategies involved in the production of the Reductive Video artwork involves single, static-framed video clips of elements continuously repeated or looped. An extension of such methods is explored in the works discussed in Abstract Video that specifically work with the mechanisms and structures of sound and video. These employ unique video technology that has been developed as part of The Amplified Experience to generate real-time abstract video by using sound as a direct input. Chapter one, subtitled “Help I’m droning”, discusses the concept of silence in relation to contemporary sound composition and performance and how this is a key aspect of my work. Chapter two, Forever Now, discusses my artistic philosophy in relation to creating this type of artwork within a technological society and its relation to potential audiences. Chapter three, Beyond the Dance Floor and Carsten Nicolai, is a critical response to the post-digital4 work of German multi-media artist Carsten Nicolai and Japanese sound artist Ryoji Ikeda, and a consideration of what sets my artwork apart from theirs. My critique of specific artists and contemporary sound and video art will be presented and establishes why my research for The Amplified Experience constitutes a new and innovative form of art making within this particular field of practice. Each text serves as conceptual and ideological platform to address the artwork I have produced within the time frame of The Amplified Experience