"Haeinsa_Palimpsest" prints and audiovisual performance were created while in residency at Haeinsa Temple in South Korea.  Each of the prints was made using a similar piece of custom software as the series of digital prints titled "Loci_". Field recordings made in and around the temple were used as raw material to merge with and manipulate existing architectural and topographic diagrams of the temple complex. The drawing process itself is performative, as each image is essentially a still from a dynamic sequence of actions using the audio waveform as a metaphorical ink. Of around 200 images created in this manner, these three were selected for inclusion in the exhibition "Tong" at Haeinsa Temple's Seongbo Museum. 

The performance below premiered at Haein Art Day and uses the same process by which the prints were created.

http://vimeo.com/31627339

Haeinsa_Palimpsest

Cathedral Scan translates the architectural plans of Gothic cathedrals into open-ended musical scores. Through a custom Max/MSP/Jitter patch, laptop and MIDI controllers, the plans are sonified in a real-time performance of image and sound. Rich organ-like harmonics and unique rhythmic signatures emerge from each graphic icon in a live scanning process. 

Groups of scanners filling the sonic spectrum may act in synch, forming a single harmonically-dense rhythm, or they may scan the plans at different speeds, resulting in complex polyrhythms. Each plan is treated as a modular score, with a distinct rhythm and timbre of its own. Also, by varying the speed and intensity of each scanning group, drone-like sounds may emerge based on the “resonant frequency” of the black and white plan. 

Visually, the scanning reveals the graphic structure. Smoke-like wisps appear and fade away as the scanners make each pass, suggesting a metaphor between architecture and ghost-like palimpsest. An empty white field surrounds each plan, placing them in a minimal landscape that is both flat and expansive. 

Album can be previewed and purchased at the Dragon's Eye Recordings website (http://www.dragonseyerecordings.com/catalogue/de5033.html)

http://vimeo.com/21245456

Cathedral Scan

Loci_ is a series of prints generated by custom sound-to-image visualization software.  Audio field recordings are fed into the system, converted to visual waveforms, then manipulated in real-time into abstract imagery that invokes the perception of landscape. There is a limited degree of control in this real-time manipulation, allowing for a range of unexpected effects to occur. 

The project continues my focus on the interstices of terrain and phenomenology, and the discarding of information that occurs during transcoding/translation from one state to another.  Also an influence in the project is the article "The Lie of the Land", written by cultural geographer Don Mitchell.  In this text Mitchell critiques a fellow geographer who claims one can glean the truth of any given landscape -- its history, geology, class structure, etc -- simply by looking at it.  In fact, says Mitchell, the view that any landscape presents is manufactured to tell a certain story, and hides more than it reveals.  In Loci_, the original space and sound of recording is alienated from and exists in parallel to the abstract non-place of the image.

Loci_

Apple Blossom Time is an audiovisual composition performed live and a wall drawing commissioned especially for a group show at the James Farley Post Office in New York.  Based on a recording of a barbershop quartet made a few years prior, small harmonic and rhythmic moments are extended into an expansive sonic wormhole that oscillates between ambient harmony and lyric song structure. Visual projection is generated in real-time by analyzing the spectral qualities of the performed sound, and is mapped onto a drawing made with gaffers tape situated in the corner of the wood-paneled room. On the surrounding walls the phrase "APPLEBLOSSOMTIME" is written in reverse, also with gaffers tape.

http://vimeo.com/57984974 

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Blake Carrington