On Sunday I was one of the artists presenting their work at If Wet, a salon-style gathering of sound artists and experimental musicians in a village hall in deepest Worcestershire. This was the culmination of a year or so’s work exploring slit-scan photography, performance photography, sonification of images and many other disparate things that I’ve been able to bring together through the framework of “being an artist”. You would not believe the freedom that gives you.
It’s also the start of something and is very much at the prototyping stage. One of the purposes of presenting at If Wet was to put a call out for collaborators who would like to work with the sounds I’m producing to make something nice, or at least interesting, out of them. I’m very aware that it currently sounds like a sonogram but, as I say repeatedly, I am not a musician and this is way out of my comfort zone. Collaboration is the way forward.
The presentation is about 25 minutes long with 10 minutes of intro, 10 minutes of demo and 5 minutes of Q&A. Thanks to Sam Underwood and David Morton for hosting.
References
Introduction
Slit-scan Photography – Examples
ANS Synthesizer
Eduard Artemyev, composer of Solaris soundtrack.
Coil’s ANS album – Samples – Download
Spectral Songs of the Slitscanned Selfies
Virtual ANS synth software (Mac / Win / Linux / iOS / Android)
Arduino Camera Shield
Demonstration
PhonoPaper app (iOS / Android)
Questions
Sarah Angliss
Steve Symons, Owl Project
Graham Dunning
Some images made during the presentation
Somewhat annoyingly I won’t have any time to develop this over the next 6-9 months because the Camera Obscura project is stepping up a gear very shortly, but I hope to come back to it in the autumn of 2015 and am really interested in finding a collaborator along the way. In the meanwhile I hope it’s inspiring and enjoyable!
Pic at top by George Benson
More photos on the If Wet blog.