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| Transcendental Etude No.1
Single Channel Video Projection 2009 | |
| Transcendental Etude No.5
Single Channel Video Projection 20010 |
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| Transcendental Etude No.1 Final Cut Screenshot (Detail)
The long lines in the center represent the ten chords in the middle of Liszt's original work for piano. The sequence was built according to the number of notes playing at any one time, so the dynamic tune appears quite flat when viewed in the sequence window. However, it is possible to see the faster areas of of the piece as areas of dense editing. Unlike previous works, this piece was constructed from both original downloaded material, and the interface of the mac desktop. So, the original material was arranged in its raw state first which then doubled as an instructional 'score'. The 'score' was 'sightread' from one computer screen, and 'performed' on the desktop of another. All the videos were docked just out of view, maximised, played through, and minimised, the order of which depended on the 'score'. What the viewer sees is actually a performance perfectly edited to match the original score. Although this method proved unimaginably time-consuming, it was the only way to preserve the integrety of a personal "edit according to frames per second only" mandate, without resorting to the trickery of vector based editing or one-click FX. "Knowing this process would push the technical requirements and patience to the extreme, I was immeadiately drawn to Franz Listz's Transcendental Etudes for their virtuoso audacity. Liszt took the Eastern idea of Transcendentalism - which had then been subsumed and watered down by European bohemian culture - and reformed it into an extroverted display of technical ability. This seemed to be the ultimate symbol of an age in which a dichotomy existed between understandings of materialism and spirituality; both were banging each other's head in the Victorian consciousness. You could say that 'materialism won' in the twentieth century. Freud's materialistic notion of the ego, how this has ironically been played out to materialism's advantage by the work of Freud's nephew, Bernase. Then there is the unquestionned acceptance of Darwin's evolution theory, the consolidation of religion's purpose into material understanding of spirit, and so on and on. Interestingly, spiritualism kept poking through the twentieth century, now it is beginning to emerge as a dominant paradigm. This is Trancendentalism's relevance, as the spiritual and material are banging their heads again today. I hope sites like YouTube make this obvious, as copyright law crumbles along with 'ownership' and 'permission', not least because everyday human experience stands to be transcended by its endless reactivation online. Culture's new fumbling self-consciousness borne of its infinite appropriative strategies is only the teething stage as the 'old world' dies. Then I think of my own 'ego' in this situation, and where I stand. The lonesome task of video editing is a different kind of transcendence, which is mindful of the challenge set over one hundred years ago, and its partial realization by the Internet." |
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