Pressure Project 1 | Neon Fragmentation
Posted: January 30, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »This piece was inspired by my personal interests in jazz, feedback systems, and media archeology. I’ve played saxophone for 10+ years and look highly upon jazz musicians as fearless explorers of sonic harmony, melody, and rhythm. Their artform requires a fine-tuned motor pathway system connecting the brain and fingers to enable quick musical decisions within an improvisatory ensemble of horns, drums, pianos, and strings. The interactions between musicians in an ensemble are unique and require a auditory feedback to create an artform bigger than any one contributor. In addition to jazz, I’ve worked with electronic feedback systems and learned to respect the impact their discovery has had on much of modern technology. These technological systems form an ecological relationship with human culture which too is receptive to feedback. The process of media archeology can help to scrutinize and analyze dominant narratives about technology and their relationship to culture.
For this project, a computational multimedia software called Isadora was used to devise an audiovisual feedback loop. This system inputs a video file undergoing several stages of video mixing and feature analysis to synchronize low and high frequency audio tone generation with video splitting. Computer vision plugins were used to detect relative motion and color within the inputted video frame. The intensity of motion detected was used to drive the quantity and frequency of video splitting in the XY directions. Additionally, the RGB color proportionality drove emission of audio tones where red produced frequencies between 30 – 400 Hz and green and blue produced frequencies between 1-2kHz.
This piece takes influence from early 1920s Montage film technique including Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mecanique. The affects of the industrial revolution are visualized through mechanical systems held at the same level of authorship as humans. Humans are depicted with cyclic motions such as a woman on a swing evoking the image of a pendulum. The rapid frame changes are also accompanied by a frenetic sound track which is synchronized to the rhythm of industry. The rapid montage clips remind me of jazz because of its quick delivery of stimulus transcending the traditional mental faculties of comprehension. It seems to me that Leger is playing around with visual Jazz in the form of semiotics. When passed through my generative media system, the quick color and shape changes lend themselves well when converted into high and low frequency tones. To the right set of ears, its difficult to tell the difference between abstract jazz and machine noises.
The assembly line style of interaction between humans and machines during and after WWII, is then expressed by a 1950s supermarket film. The women in the store is surrounded by an array of homogenous consumables which funnel smoothly down a conveyor belt, into her car, and then presumably into the home. There is an element of time ticking in the store from the machine noise pressing of keys on the cash-register to the conducting of cars via neon traffic light systems. This exchange of information and household goods all flows to the beat of machine inputs and outputs.
Human-machine stimulus and interaction is even more pronounced in the situation of the 1970s Las Vegas strip. Suburban tourists have gathered in neon wild west in search of cowboys and gold nuggets. Immersed in an ecosystem of electric light and casinos, tourists can at a safe distance engage in a symbolic exchange of money and neon. Grande advertising spectacles erected in the desert now being closer in association to sinful redlight districts than with their initial connotation of technological optimism.
I hope that this piece brings attention to interrelations of human and machines in the 20th century. The aesthetic of multivid splitting by computer vision and foreign sounds helps bring these media artifacts into the vantage of the modern algorithmic viewer. Just as machines influenced human perception and behavior, so too are algorithms.
Media artifacts: