I’ve had a breakthough about my project. I guess it’s the proposal deadline. As my artist friend John Hammersley said “Deadlines are like lifelines, but no one throws you one when you need one”. All this discussion about the final show 2006 has got me thinking about possible performative elements to my work. I’ve been thinking about conducting an orchestra of visuals, people holding up cards that are sliced up bits of the frame in the style of a sports stadium or the recent extravaganza in North Korea.

I see that some LA newagers are selling colour therapy DVDs at http://www.colourcalm.com/. I was interested in the idea of questioning where is the threshold between meaning and meaninglessness (I suspect this is a reaction to my day job making information graphics for TV). But more in conjunction with sound, and minimal changes in frequencies. However, I was worried about the potential dangers of making the visual equivalent of MUZAK. This website puts me off.

Flatpack Film Festival, Birmingham Jan 19-22 2006. Presented by 7inch Cinema. Some fantastic and interesting works of cinema. I attended an interesting talk by Esther Leslie called ‘Hollywood Flatlands’ about the connection between early cartooning and the avant-garde, which was later replace by Disney Syrup.
A true highlight was VLADMASTER (http://www.valdmaster.com), short films made as 3D stills designed to be viewed on mass through 1980’s viewmasters. There was a narrated soundtrack that included a sound effect that announced time to change to the next slide. This was such a novel approach to filmmaking as the pieces were very cinematic in feel and pacing but delivered in a completely new way. We watched it at Birmingham’s historic Electric Cinema with our viewmasters pointed to the empty white light of the cinema screen. It was an interesting combination of a private shared experience.
The other highlight was the musical group The Destroyers scored and performed accompaniment to the archival films from the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection. The music was in the genre of Jewish Folk and European Gypsy music whose liveliness and pace suited the footage. I always enjoy live scored and performed soundtracks to films. I once saw Phillip Glass conduct the Phillip Glass Ensemble performing Koyanisquasti live.

New year new enthusiasm.
Back from holidays with a few deadlines on the horizon has got me thinking.
I have been looking into the connections between colour and sound. John Gage has led me to the 17th century’s attempted to match the intervals of the musical scale with corresponding colours. However, this was problematic at the time, as Western music was moving away from away from the modes of the ancients towards an even tempered scale. Newton, Kepler and Descartes made graphical representations of the colour-sound scale where Castel made plans for an ocular harpsichord, however it seems that this machine was never built.
I’ve been thinking that I could make movies of the colours of different cultures using these colour-sound scales. I could choose pieces of music that are indicative of non-western cultures and translate them to visual movies using solid colour to represent the intervals used and use edits to represent the rhythm.
What would it look like if it was silent? Would you be able to recognise the culture from the colours?
I would need to be careful to try and be as objective as possible when choosing colours for quartertones from the colour-sound scale, and not be influenced by modern aesthetics and cultural assumptions.