D O CU M E N TAT I O N B O O K L E T 1
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KEEPING TRACK To the right you will find various useful links to blogs and sites that were essential in the development of this project. Including: The official house artist
Soundcloud of witch Sidewalks & Skeletons,
A 4th year progress blog which details my own exploration of the topic of Glitch Art The Gyro
brief of Nights”
the
2015 arts
“Papay festival.
This documentation booklet will specifically deal with the process of creating the “Letting Go” music video in part fulfilment of the “Papay Gyro Nights” open call for single channel video and installation artworks.
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T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S 4
Papay Gyro
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The Brief
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Synopsis
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Research
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Inspiration
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Glitch Art
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Filming
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Process
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Imagery
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Outcome
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P G
A P A Y R
Y O Papay Gyro Nights is a multimedia arts festival set on the island of Papay,Scotland. Excerpt
from
the
site:
“The Festival is a Research lab, learning hub and the place for a discussion about interaction between new media and ideas in relation to tradition, ritual and island’s landscape and heritage. During the Festival the Island is transformed into the art space and artworks are screened and exhibited in old farm buildings, boat house, workshops, ruins and open landscape.” Although it kicks off in this small Scottish island, the festival in the past has toured far and wide , exhibiting in places like Hong Kong, Belgrade, Faroe Islands, Iceland, and many more. The festival was chosen for it’s unique location, and the relevance of it’ media (video art) to my skills.
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5th edition of Papay Gyro Nights Art Festival is taking place 3 - 10 February 2015 in Orkney (Scotland), 6 - 20 March 2015 in Hong Kong and through the year will be continued as an international touring and exchange programme Artists from anywhere in the world are invited to submit video art works: single-channel and installation OCEAN, as a theme, is not a limitation, but an opportunity to dissolve borders and boundaries, to”become like water”, to submerge a rigid landmass, to look at OCEAN as a way of action, philosophical paradigm, world of folklore, posthuman ecology, or as a mass of water
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I intend to explore this notion of Ocean and it’s ability to “dissolve border and boundaries” by linking them with the imagery that I can extract from a variety of Orkney folklore. In that sense, I want to combine the “world of folklore” with ocean “as a way of action”. In it’s powerful to sweep, consume, and take us to it’s depths. Having not knowing much about the folklore of Orkney, I am keen to get involved and explore this rich world of vivid tales which I until now left untapped.
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S y n o p s i s The festival also asked for artists to submit a synopsis of 300 words with their work with a “submission form”. The contents of which are available on desk as submission and included here: “Letting Go” is a video which employs the vivid imagery found in Orkney tradition and folklore as a device to explore a range of fantastical visual compositions. The brief asks for artists to explore “Ocean” as a thematic device and this video completes this through desolving borders and boundaries, and revealing ocean as a way of action. Through the video, we are taken on a visual journey that can either be strongly evident, metaphorical or subtle. Such as a “sorrowful lady, clad in a long white dress” from the tale “The Laird o’Clestrain” and where “A ghostlyfaint shape remained, then blinked into oblivion”. Throughout the video, we see strange, distorted transitions of people, places, and objects twisting and dissolving into watery masses.
The belief that “Birds were also common precursors of death” is rife through the video, we see birds flying overhead in-between scenes, foreboding and disquiet. The belief of “death dreams” with visions of a ship travelling on dry land being an omen, where in the video we see a graveyard that melts away to reveal a boat slowly sailing through the land, and in it’s wake, turning the graves to water. All these dreamy, surreal visions swirl together in one unhinged visual experience. All footage was filmed locally in Edinburgh and the surrounding areas. The aesthetic techniques of “glitch art”, a new media artistic style, were used to connect this idea of fusing the “new” (media) and “old” (folklore). The music genre “witch house” was chosen as a musical accompaniment to the video, due to the haunting and ethereal imagery evident in the area’s folklore. The music is by artist Jake Lee (Sidewalks & Skeletons), permission was gained to use this audio. This video also serves as a music video for this purpose.
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r e s e a r c h My research took the form of an annotated sketchbook. I began by researching in depth various Orkney folklores and tradition via. online and in print. From this I extracted vivid imagery and created tables and lists of potential assets and began to build a selection of images I would then go out in capture and/or recreate in the surrounding areas.
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INSPIR ATION
I investigated a number of other music videos that had an alternative, nostalgic, or glitch feel to them. Sourcing them as inspiration for my own project.
Above, is a music video for “Streaker� called tobacco. In the first shot it employs the retro television set to set the mood of the video. I particularly like the nostalgic, haunting feel the combination of glitch effects and older technology creates. Video
link
to
the
left.
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This is an unofficial video for the song “Clams Casino” - I’m God It has a similar subject matter related to the brief and also contains a nostalgic, vintage format despite being a modern video. Video
link
to
the
left.
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The festival is described as “a Research lab, learning hub and the place for a discussion about interaction between new media and ideas in relation to tradition, ritual and island’s landscape and heritage.”
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I decided to employ the use of the Glitch Art aesthetic to make this connection between the “new” (media) and the “old” (folklore) As well as being relevant to my topic of study,I felt that the haunting imagery of the Orkney folklore would be suited to the equally often wicked imagery associated with Glitch Art, hoping this would produce a powerful visual consistency.
L e f t : “Man in the Cafe” hex-edit by Jura McKay
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F I L M I N G
I began the filming process by scouting for locations that I could capture the powerful imagery present in the Orkney folklore. Identifying a variety of locations within travelling distance. Equipment
used:
L e i t Imagery of the show travelling on
h boat dry
: to land.
Grange Graveyard: Where the images of the silent white lady will be shot. Princes Street Graveyard: Where the images of the tour through the graveyard will be shot. P o r t o b e l l o : Where the images of the ocean and birds will be shot. 12
P r o c e s s A variety of techniques were involved to create the desired effect seen in the video. These were used in various combinations to create the broken, haunted aesthetic. This section will chronicle what these effects are, how they were produced, and their visual outcomes in relation to the video.
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Sonification is the name given to the process of translating raw data into a sound format, and making changes to the data as if it were a sound. The program used here is audacity. In this example, the effect “echo� was applied to the majority of the sound bite, producing. It is also possible to perform sonification on videos for a moving glitch effect.
Use
in
video:
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P i x e l - s o r t i n g Pixel-sorting is a glitch art technique first created by the artist Kim Asendorf. It was created in the coding language processing, and is open-source and free to apply to your own images. It operates by “smearing� pixels according to colour location to create a sort of modern, messy yet ordered, scan-line effect. This is one my favourite techniques and was used in a lot of scenes with the white lady, it was also used as the flair for cover and flairs of this booklet.
Use
in
video:
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D a t a - M o s h i n g Is the glitch “transition” effect that makes things look they are dissolving/melting into each other. This is created by using a rather simplistic video editor called “avidemux”.What we do here is set a video to have a keyframe something like one every 999999 frames, resulting in a video having just one key frame at the start. From this we can delete “p-frames” and the video begins to distort because it has no keyframe for reference. We cannot use more up to date editors like final cut and Premiere because they will instantly try to “fix” the effect you are trying to create. Use
in
video:
As this is an animated effect, it is best viewed as a video. Here is a link to my tumblr of a datamosh used in the video, but without colour correction and other layered effects:
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I M A G E R Y
L e f t : At 01:00 we are first met with the bird which the camera tracks.This is a repeating theme through the video, in Orkney folklore the bird is an omen for death.
In this section, the imagery used is explained through the context of the finished video. Highlighting connections and metaphorical visions that we picked out from the vivid stories of Orkney folklore.
R i g h t : At 01:32, the white lady is swept away by the ocean. This directly relates the thematic content of the brief as ocean as a way of action.
M i d d l e : At 01:04 we are first met with the sorrowful silent lady in a long white robe described in the tale “The laird o’Clestrain”
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L e f t : At 01:59 we see the fabled “boat travelling on land” , which in folklore, within a dream, was a sure sign of death. Datamoshing was used to create this effect.
R i g h t : At 03:02 the ways begin to crawl backwards, swallowing all with it. Directly relating the quote in the brief of “the might ocean”.
M i d d l e : As the video progresses into the later stages, we see the bird transition into the form of a plane. Again, this is a device to transistion the old to the new. 18
O U T C O M E
The intended display format of this video is through a preflatscreen television such as a CRT. The purpose of using this format is to breathe live back into the “dead format” PAL . As the video was created in 640 x 480, negating quality for visceral feel, it is the perfect medium for the video. Giving the impression that instead of being “new” footage, it is old corrupt footage. You can also view the video on Vimeo through the button below.
Older Television models also have the added bonus of adding analogue “noise”, a beautiful artefact feature that is missing from swish digital sets. The video will sent to Papay Gyro organisers as a single channel video.
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In it’s current form, this piece of work could easily be worked into an installation piece. If this were to happen I would propose the following: Splitting up the video into segments of nine squares. Due to budget constraints I could not source 9 old style CRT television but I have mapped out what ideally the finished installation would look like, each square represents a television stacked on top of one another. This would be accompanied by a powerful sound system.
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