Audiovisual Experiments
CutUp by Coin Sluzalek
My project is a digital cut up made with found footage, numerology, random number generators and cartomancy, in the tradition of the technique as developed by William S. Burroughs and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. In this lineage, the goal of the cut up is to remove your thinking mind from the creative process and allow meaning to surface in synchronicity. Historically cut ups have been made with razor blades and analog film or tapes, so I adapted the method for my digitized means. I carefully selected the footage beforehand. Then I made several cut ups in Premiere using random integer and sequence generators, virtual dice, numerology and cartomancy to dictate clip order and select time stamps. I also tried picking at random while listening to very loud noisy music (to overwhelm my senses and make it harder to discern with intention), and selecting clips chronologically in 5 second intervals starting at the beginning of the first video (eg. first clip 0:00-0:005, second clip 0:05-0:10, and so on). I made my favourite cut ups while my head was empty and I was focused on my breath. Spaciousness–>less ruled by thoughts–>easier to automatically arrange clips–>clearer synchronous messages come through. The cut up linked above is my favourite, and I made it with cartomancy.
Found footage/sound recomposed by Coin Sluzalek
Morning Routine by Tara Osan
For this project I used clips of my friend acting out a daily routine, and overlaid sounds from other things around my house and neighbourhood. It was an interesting process, trying to find sounds that could be used for different visuals. I started with a list of all the visuals I could use in a routine, and thought of corresponding sounds. I recorded visual and audio on two different days. It was a long, trial and error process but super fun!
Video & Sound by Tara Osan
Memory Overwrite by Shengye Wang
I made a music video that kind of tells the story of a cyborg that tries to overwrite his painful memories, but these memories have become a part of him, it’s painful but also precious, and he lived along with it.
Music & Animation by Shengye Wang
Kultura by Luka Hinic
What does it mean to have a cultural identity? I was born and raised in Canada, but does that make my cultural identity Canadian? My father is from Serbia and my mother from Croatia, both from the former Yugoslavia. Is my culture, Yugoslavian, a country which doesn’t exist anymore? For most of my life I haven’t had much ties with my culture of origin, often identifying with my country of residence over it. I never learned to speak Serbian or Croatian, besides the odd sentence or two, never engaged in traditional activities and cultural standing points of Serbia/Croatia. As a child, I often visited Croatia/Serbia, but still I refused to embrace that aspect of myself. I for the most part was Canadian, except for music. Music always seems to act as this doorway to the culture I casted away as a child. Serbian/Croation music is rich, diverse and playful, using practices that aren’t often represented in western music notation or knowledge bases. Recently, I have been trying to dismantle this cultural wall that I built up as a child, and it started by listening to this music.
The animation is a symbolic journey of my knowledge and disconnect with Croatian/Serbian culture and how my experience is often disrupted, only lingering through the experience of music. The music is an original composition, however, uses recordings and melodies from traditional Croatian singing, the vocals are from Ansambl Lado performance of Idu Babe Od Zornice. The beginning is content, allowing myself to live in this fictional landscape unknowing of cultural identity. As I grow up, my culture catches up with me, leaving me in a hallway, trying to lead me to acceptance (the shell in the centre screen). However, I prevent myself from acceptance, the animation following a series of glitches and confusing sounds. The singing continues but is spaced out by electronic instruments and violins, representing other musical tastes but always arriving back to Serbian/Croatian music. The next scene, a cybernetic figure, follows the way technology allowed me to explore culture and identity further, eventually leading me to acknowledgement. The last figure, with the fluid flowing through them, is research, the journey to flow into my culture, leading to the final scene where acceptance is reached.
Vocal singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs6D9...
Animated in Blender, edited in Adobe Premiere Pro, music composed in GarageBand using multiple vst plugins. Image textures from, poliigon.com, and mantissa.xyz
Music & Animation by Luka Hinic