This Saturday at the Furtherfield gallery One minute (Volume One) curated by Kerry Baldry will be screening. Included, as part of the programme is a video
called Jiggery Pokery I made back in 2005. Jiggery Pokery was part of a
sequence of pieces, which attempted to very directly link sound and image.
During the 1990s I created a number of
installations in which a key element was the interplay of sound
and vision, and once I got my first Mac in late 1997 I began experimenting with
various programmes that allowed you do this on screen. The Mac in question had
a blistering 200 MHZ processor and it wasn’t until 2002 when I upgraded to an
iMac G3 (600 MHZ) that really anything of interest began to happen. In 2001 I
also came across an application called Vidoedelic that provided real scope for
linking image manipulation to either sound or midi signals.
Using sound files or live sound in
Videodelic was rather imprecise, working as it did rather like a colour organ by
filtering the sound into frequency bands (bass, mid or high) and then allowing
you to apply one or other band to a parameter. Anything other than a very
straightforward bass beat was hard to track. What worked much better was using MIDI data.
The MIDI value of notes could be precisely
matched to parameter changes. So for example as you ascended up a scale an
image could rotate in steps precisely equivalent to each interval. Using this
approach I worked up a number of pieces. As with the installations the idea was
to use sound to animate the image in some way, articulating a tangentially
related aspect or property. So for example in A Rocco Din the idea was to take
a picture of an accordion and then have a piece of accordion music perform a digital
dissection of the image.
A Rocco Din was the first piece to be
completed and took a couple of months to finish, this was largely down to technical
problems as though Videodelic can record QuickTime movies of its output it
can’t do this when being controlled by MIDI, only when using sound files. The
solution ended up being using an on screen recorder with the midi track running at ¼
speed then speeding it all back up… all in all far more than the iMac could handle. Arriving at a perfect sync, which was
in a way the whole idea proved to be very difficult.
The next completed piece was Jiggery Pokery. Again working from a single image this time of two highland dancers and
using an adapted MIDI file of a highland jig as an animation source the image
was coerced into ‘dancing’. By this time I had acquired a box that meant one
could play the piece live on the iMac and output the VGA of the computer to a DV
camera. Not entirely without loss of quality, but a lot easier than the first
method.
Two more pieces were completed using a similar
approach Quadrangle and Row Row, working from an image of a white square and of
two men in a boat respectively. Quadrangle uses a quasi-random midi sequence
generator producing a possible more inventive series of sequences than those
used in A Rocco Din or Jiggery Pokery. Quadrangle also uses the midi data to
change the colour of the image. Row Row in contrast is the most straightforward
of the four works with the image of the two men in the boat being stretched to create
the illusion of the image rowing.
Looking back of the four pieces, Quadrangle
and Jiggery Pokery still seem to ‘work’ the other two seem a little too restrained
possibly hidebound by the technical difficulties it took to simply finish them.
After making the four pieces, which took best part of two years I largely stopped
using Videodelic as it was never upgraded from OS 9 to Mac OS X, and the problems with
capturing the output were never resolved. Instead I began to use Max/MSP/Jitter
to make pieces such as Fleshtones.
It might be
interesting one day to revisit the pieces in a more performative fashion.
