There are an absence of linguistic aphorisms at one's disposal when trying to describe the experience of watching Andrzej Żuławski's On the Silver Globe (1988), which struck me like a lightning bolt after initially watching it for the first time during the early years of the COVID-19 global pandemic. On the one hand, you are immediately shocked into a primeval mode of understanding and unable to form comprehensions of what you are witnessing; on the other hand, the traces leave their marks indelibly in the psyche, as they do on the skin of actual survivors of lighting strikes, in fractal-like disseminations. When I was invited to participate in a new screening of the film held at the PRS I wanted to present something that could trace the lines of the film itself, or rather the lightning that I experienced, rather than merely accompany it as an overture with a piece of through-composed or improvised music.
A methodology was devised to take a bird's eye view of a large subsection of the film's individual frames chronologically from beginning to end and then downsample the color information in each of those individual frames so that the pixel data becomes 2000-byte text strings comprised of numerical sequences. These sequences are then used to generate a stream of musical data that we can listen to as we move through the grid of frames, one by one, forming alchemical isomorphs of the visual content with new sonic entities, ones that make themselves heard as well as seen as they undergo this process of transformation. It is my hope then that the performance will remain inextricably linked to the intrinsic components of the celluloid, and allow for a critical dissection of its contents in our perspectival memory as well as inform a pre-intuited and abstracted grasping of the film's merits before viewing it in its totality. Hence the title of my piece Within the Silver Plane, envisions and de-visions the latent elements contained and hidden within the flatness of the single frame.
Program: W Srebrnym Planie (Within The Silver Plane) Audio/Visual Overture to On The Silver Globe
Venue: Philosophical Research Society
Location: Los Angeles, California, United States
Date: 2024 July 13
There are an absence of linguistic aphorisms at one's disposal when trying to describe the experience of watching Andrzej Żuławski's On the Silver Globe (1988), which struck me like a lightning bolt after initially watching it for the first time during the early years of the COVID-19 global pandemic. On the one hand, you are immediately shocked into a primeval mode of understanding and unable to form comprehensions of what you are witnessing; on the other hand, the traces leave their marks indelibly in the psyche, as they do on the skin of actual survivors of lighting strikes, in fractal-like disseminations. When I was invited to participate in a new screening of the film held at the PRS I wanted to present something that could trace the lines of the film itself, or rather the lightning that I experienced, rather than merely accompany it as an overture with a piece of through-composed or improvised music.
A methodology was devised to take a bird's eye view of a large subsection of the film's individual frames chronologically from beginning to end and then downsample the color information in each of those individual frames so that the pixel data becomes 2000-byte text strings comprised of numerical sequences. These sequences are then used to generate a stream of musical data that we can listen to as we move through the grid of frames, one by one, forming alchemical isomorphs of the visual content with new sonic entities, ones that make themselves heard as well as seen as they undergo this process of transformation. It is my hope then that the performance will remain inextricably linked to the intrinsic components of the celluloid, and allow for a critical dissection of its contents in our perspectival memory as well as inform a pre-intuited and abstracted grasping of the film's merits before viewing it in its totality. Hence the title of my piece Within the Silver Plane, envisions and de-visions the latent elements contained and hidden within the flatness of the single frame.
Program: W Srebrnym Planie (Within The Silver Plane) Audio/Visual Overture to On The Silver Globe
Venue: Philosophical Research Society
Location: Los Angeles, California, United States
Date: 2024 July 13