Mark Fell and minimalism
Another week of less than ideal research, due to two things: my first dose of the AZ vaccine completely destroyed me for two days, and I’ve had to dedicate a significant amount of my time to another assignment—a homage to Mark Fell’s Multistability (2010) in the form of a rhythmic sequencer for Max/MSP. It’s looking good though:
It’s giving me a good project to use as motivation to dive in to Max again. Additionally, it led me to dig deeper into Fell’s process, and as such I realised that he wrote a thesis on his works (Fell 2013).
I’ve only briefly skimmed through so far, but the reasoning behind his work Attack on Silence (2008) was something interesting that I could relate back to my HMsEx projects:
“My intention was to create a work that presented the audience with static audio-visual formations, lasting for several minutes without change. Here the format of the image presented a number of possible options that were deliberately not acted upon; presenting a work that established a self-consciously ‘dormant’ system … I considered this to be a critical response to the prevailing trend among my contemporaries.”
It was interesting to read this, especially since I hadn’t previously thought to analyse the why of Fell’s intensely minimalist work. It amused me to realise that, at least in the context of this work, the reasoning behind it was similar to the reason why I started making minimal music—because my peers were making music completely opposite to minimalism.
The work is satisfactorily minimal:
The combination of discovering this work (and Fell’s reasoning behind it) alongside Darrin’s comments in class about the possibility of the hypnotising experience being compromised by too drastic an ‘arc’ of valence, I’ll be re-thinking the approach for my Capitol Theatre piece, perhaps taking a risk and making a piece that seems almost static, with very slow, gradual changes, rather than the distinct sections of my current idea. It’d certainly be an interesting experiment with the lighting system. Gradual changes in rhythm (perhaps even going in and out of sync in homage to Steve Reich) and colour.
Visual research
As part of my research into more hypnotic imagery for my browser-based works, I’ve subscribed to the Perfect Loops community on Reddit. This has proven to be a goldmine of hypnotic moving imagery.
Source – Downward Spiral by Reddit user kinetic-graphics
Analysis of the above animation revealed that there is something very interesting going on that makes the loop particularly hypnotic: each ball actually travels on an elliptical path, rather than in a spiral downwards. This is due to the continual zooming, synced with the addition of track pieces to the spiral.
Source: Minty Sphinx Tiles by Reddit user jn3008 (best experienced by visiting link for looped version)
The perspective play in the above animation is so powerful, it almost makes me sick. What makes it so effective is the way the tiles collapse into the background and become larger, with implied upward movement in contrast to the downward movement of the foreground tiles. It reminds me of the incredibly odd spatial/perspective distortions I experience in fever dreams, where objects are simultaneously miniscule and enormous; or right in front of my face and kilometres away. I need to experiment with such juxtapositions of movement and scale in 2D.
References
Fell, M 2010, Multistability, sound recording, Raster-Noton, Chemnitz.
Fell, M 2013, ‘Works in sound and pattern synthesis ~ folio of works’, PhD thesis, University of Surrey.
Attack on Silence 2008, DVD, LINE Sound Art Editions, Los Angeles, California, created by Mark Fell.