9006 :: 1998

Made in 1998, this video was first screened at the Raindance Film Festival, 1999. We were invited by Damjam Bogdanovic to produce a music driven visual piece, for the Experimental Shorts section of the festival.

It was subsequently submitted for the Prix Ars Electronica, and featured in the 0rphan Drift CCRU ‘Syzygy’ collaboration, also 1999.

THE IDEAS BEHIND 9006

Description of the Artistic Concept and Content of the Work

Orphan Drift produces work built by multiple identities, in response to a culture increasing in complexity and rates of change through new technologies and sciences, global power structures and media scapes. We create works in which disparate frames of reference coexist and bleed into each other, with the purpose of evolving our perception of what it is to be human. We are fundamentally concerned with developing new modes ofexpression sufficient to convey a hybrid and complex sense of the ‘real’.

We are primarily interested in frictions occurring between imagination and sensation and see our works as manifestations of the ‘webs’ created by these frictions. We take a deliberately feedback oriented, non-purist approach to the technics of interface and bring our audience into an immersive and multi-layered environment. It is essential for us that the interaction is based on haptic/synaesthetic/non linguistic rather than sight led perception.

The piece 9006 is designed to manifest the virtual processes of the digital aesthetic on screen, extended as actual yet invisible physical process outside of screen space, embodied through sound. 9006 is a 10 minute installation piece involving sometimes mirrored video projection on 2 screens and a vocal/soundscape. Its content is conveyed through the circuit between the video and the sound affecting physical space, in what we call a ‘sensorial-cybernetic’ environment. Sound is all around the audience and physical in texture. Fluid speeding images pattern the walls, flickering. A mesmeric induction of synaesthetic response and corporeal disorientation. Emotional and physical triggers are meshed up by the choreographed rhythmic exchange between video and sound. Their frequencies match continuously. Volume differences in the sound are matched by intensity shifts in the visuals. A sense of spatial abduction and sensorial experiment are suggested.

There are three main elements involved the making of 9006 which mesh up to produce the ‘turning inside out’ of perception intended.

1. Core to our video production is that it takes inspiration from current digital music production. And the visuals produced mostly exist in sound. We research assembly patterns for video through the processes of feedback and reverb, complex layering and warping and we use the sampling and remix issue to set up a video production process that operates across the members of 0rphan Drift.

By displacing processes associated with one medium into another, spatial and rhythmic disorientation creates a synaesthetic space. Applied to recognizable imagery this evolves techniques which mutate familiar codes of sensation, temporality and recognition in order to break with the tradition of screen space as a distant and purely representational dimension. The combination of a journey further and further into abstract process with the continuous mutation of image makes the video space draw you in, dissolving the sense of a solid wall. 9006 sets up a gap between the two video spaces, a shadowy flickering ‘doorway’ inviting the gaze to fall past it into sound, infinite and abstract in its geometries. 9006 visualises and tracks the space that digital music makes not only rhythmically but emotionally and texturally.Machine processes usually made invisible in broadcast images (ie feedback, static, magnetic fields etc.) are manifest as an integral part of the representational images on screen. These vibrational fields, usually confined to sonic imagination,trigger vision led sensations of intimate touch. Synaesthesia rather that audio sync.

9006’s fluid shivering half recognised imagery weaves a molecular and hidden perspective with the seduction of surface: translating the essence of sonic vibration.This work is designed to activate the buried sensual plane which we feel operates in a more more extensive and physical way than does the learnt model of sight-led perception.

2. Artificial Time. The digital aesthetic is so much about non linear time for us. Our fictions always explore the speed/time warps usually expressed by digital sound artists.Experienced time is utterly recoded by rhythm and complexity and feedback.

9006 offers some kind of alternative version or ‘real time simulation’ of artificial time, whereby the audience feels spread out simultaneously across multiple speeds and directions, physically held in the possibility of seemless splicing and draining time. We try to push the time based nature of video into extremes, constantly feeding analogue and digital sections of video into each other in order to create frictions between their different time registers. One also feels time layers through imagery whose tones reveal the abstract in the familiar and vice versa. 9006 liquid surfaces convey these intensities materially whilst always in a time frame you could never be in: again, audio tactics. These time frames are partially created through time stretching and looping- digital replication of time. The effect of this when rendered visually and in sound simultaneously, can suspend the audience in a state of mesmerised synaesthetic sensation. Uncertainty and afterimage. Subphysical and hyperphysical. This is where linear time falls apart.

3. Replication and Sampling. We see these as the technics allowing us to explore the way things change in different contexts/environments. By folding representation into replication as one of many points of view, it ceases to be the dominant form of perception and allows us to work with it in a transformative way. The replication and mutation of particular imagery through a video developes a sense of evolving real presence. Mutated images trigger ideas about the both beautiful and extreme fictions that are produced out of the visions we get from new technologies.

Our videomaking process involves sampling as many points of view as possible and bringing them together into a singular rhythmic data flow, signalling the way that new points of view change our fictions about ourselves. Replication and sampling both allow us to focus further and further into an image surface and to feel its presence as a trajectory [as one can follow a line in a track], allowing us to try to experience the possibility of moving in and out of it.