Single Screen Videos

In the 2000s I began to make single screen using the then emerging software that opened up the possibilities for interacting sound with image. A series known as the Chronocuts began around 2007 which mess with the space time continuum these have their own page.  

The videos were screened initially online and then at film  and video festivals, and with many of the pieces being short form they found a serendipitous home in the 10 volumes of One minute Films curated by Kerry Baldry which toured internationally and has been recently archived at The British Film Institute. 

Something in The Air (2020) 

A single image taken in a park during lockdown is dissected and then reconstituted using a soundtrack of birdsong.

Selected for One Minute Volume 10 screened at:  VisualContainerTV, UK, Contemporary Art Ruhr, Germany. 303 Projects, UK.

Pebble Dot Dash (2018) 

Pebble Dot Dash was the first longer form (over ten minutes) video I had made in a while and combines hand-held flâneur footage with shortwave radio recordings. The camera takes a series of walks on and off the beaten track around the coastal town of Hastings. Time slips elliptically by as movements there and back are merged electronically.

The moving images are married with shortwave transmissions from across the globe, captured during filming. Sound and image mesh asynchronously, global audio relocating the here to there.

Screened at: London Animation Club, UK (2018), Hosted on the Wire Music Magazine YouTube channel (2018- present), extracts shown at MPE & MeCCSA Symposium 'Contexts of Film Practice', at University of Lincoln, UK (2018).

Self Oscillation (2016) 

In self-oscillation an old photo of the artist from the 1980s is digitally manipulated to make it shift and distort; at times almost appearing to dance. The image movement is transformed into sound and provides a synchronised quasi-musical accompaniment. Yet it is unclear if the moving figure is dancing to the music or being danced by it, hovering on the cusp of audio-visual adhesion.   

Selected for One Minute Programme volume 9 screened at over 40 venues UK and International.

Tracking (2016)

Tracking is an abstraction of the: sound, shifting light patterns, temporal movements and multi dimensional perspectives, experienced when travelling by train. The relationship between sound and image is asynchronous with a loose counterpoint between the changing patterns and the pulsations of the music.

Screened at: Greenwich SOUND/IMAGE Festival, University of Greenwich, UK (2017), Darkroom Film Festival, UK (2018), Festival, UK. Bogotá Experimental Film Festival, Colombia (2017),  Symposium on 21st century music practices, South Bank University (2017). 

Moth Flight (2016)

Made to celebrate the 75^th anniversary of the death of Amy Johnson, the first female pilot to fly from Britain to Australia in her Puss Moth plane, the audience is encouraged to ask, is the ‘action’ producing the sound, or is the movement of the image in some way generating the sound or?

Moth Flight was Highly Commended in the UK Category of the 75 Second Film Awards. These awards were part of the Amy Johnson Festival, celebrating Hull's aviation heroine on the 75th Anniversary of her death in 1941.

Insoluble (2012)

A simple 'trick' video - a humorous take on transsubstantiation of cinema. An early version was made around 2005 with a HD version being reshot specifically for a large scale touring programme of video. Note: there is sound.

Screened at: Selected for the 100 x 100 touring exhibition which across 18 months screened at over 40 venues, UK and international. 

Battle of the Pixels (2010)

Glissandi strings matched to arcing camera movement is a Hollywood staple, used to heighten moments of dramatic significance. Battle of the Pixels uses the dynamics of the orchestral flourishes of an extract from the soundtrack to The Battle of Britain (1969) to provide the reference points for the skewing of an image of a Kent field. The distortions create a sense of flight, mirroring the aerial acrobatics of the original film’s cinematography. Loose asynchronism here is more akin to Eisenstein style contrapuntalism, with a degree of verticality added to the horizontal.

Screened as part of One Minute Hull Artists’ Moving Image Festival, Hull, UK (2015), 

No Particular Place to Go (2009)

No particular place to go was an installation at the Memorial Gallery in Hastings (UK). The video version takes the images shown on the three monitors in the gallery and turns them into a triptych.  

Screened at: Installation exhibited at the Memorial Gallery, Hastings, UK (2009), video then shown on line. 

Product Recall (2009)

The press release went: We are pleased to announce a unique new premier product for that milestone once in a lifetime occasion such as an anniversary, birthday, wedding or as a one-off gift for someone special. The product is made of an alloy glass and onyx compound that changes shape to fit the wearer and the occasion. One moment it is a ring the next a ceremonial dagger; it is whatever the wearer desires. View a prototype sample here.

Screened at: IotaSalon,USA (2008), Memorial Art Gallery, Hastings, UK (2009), London Animation Club, London, UK (2009), Cogcollective, Melbourne, Australia (2010).

Land Fill (2008)

The yodel might be considered an early form of sonification, as a purported function of the idiosyncratic style of singing was as a distance sonar in the Swiss Alps.  Landfill plays with this idea by linking the time signature of the treated yodelling with the frame-by-frame changes in an animated morphing topography, resembling a satellite time-lapse view of a landscape whose peaks, valleys and ridges are in a constant state of flux. 

Screened at: London Animation Festival, London, UK (2008), Memorial Art Gallery, Hastings, UK (2009).

Kisser (2007)

If in A Rocco Din (see below) specific notes and image movements are synchronised, in contrast in Kisser what was sought was a single long evolving durational interplay. To achieve this granular synthesis was applied to both image and sound. The close binding together of inevitably has a certain synaesthetic quality, and Kisser actively seeks to draw the viewer into an immersive moment, before emerging or exiting, as the image reconstitutes itself.

Screened at: The Back door, Melbourne, Australia (2009), Memorial Art Gallery, Hastings, UK (2009), London Animation Club, London, UK (2013), Altered States, Electro Studios, West St Leonards, UK (2015). A one minute version was selected for One Minute Volume 2, screened at: Gallery Space, Cow Lane Studios, Salford, UK. The Big Screen, Hull, UK. Marseille Project Gallery, Marseille, France. Red Gallery, Hull, UK. Roxy Nod, Prague, Czech Republic. Directors Lounge, Berlin, Germany. Artprojx Space, London, UK. EXP24, Victoria Hotel, Leeds, UK. (2008 -09).

Fleshtones (2006)

Fleshtones conflates two desires: firstly to see that which is hidden, and secondly for there to be a harmonic correspondence between music and colour. The piece was created using a Max patch that heavily pixelates the pornographic video footage fed into it. The changing hues of the resultant large colour blocks are turned into MIDI notes (by the same patch) and sent to a piano synthesizer to create the soundtrack. 

Fleshtones might seem initially to be a simple digital colour organ, but the unseen element provides an arbitrary counterpoint to the seeming literal equation of colour and melody. However strong our antipathy to pornography, there is a desire to see what is hidden. That this is denied acts as an asynchronous irritant in the otherwise polite combination of coloured squares and piano notes.

Screened at: Cog Collective, London, UK (2006), Punto Y Raya festival - Oficial competition Section, Italy (2007) Telenoika, Barcelona, Sapin (2007), Hair of thd Dog Exhibition: CCA, Santa Fe (Installation version - 2008), USA, Iota Salon, The iotaCenter, Los Angeles, USA (2009), Memorial Gallery, Hastings, UK (2009), London Animation Club, London UK (2013), Sound & Image Colloquium, University of Greenwich, Greenwich, UK (2015).

Jiggery Pokery (2005)

In Jiggery Pokery a JPEG of two highland dancers is animated using digital data that also produces a traditional highland jig accompaniment. The vertical and horizontal stretching of the image creates a somewhat comedic and exaggerated illusion of movement, a distorted approximation of a highland dance.

Selected for One Minute Volume 1: screened at: Cog Collective, London, UK. Directors Lounge, Berlin, Germany. Roxy Nod, Prague, Czech Republic. OUTVIDEO Video Arts Festival, Russia. Hornsey Town Hall, Crouch End, London, UK. The Hull International ShortFilm Festival, Hull, UK. The Directors Lounge, Berlin, Germany (2007 - 2008). Also screened at: Memorial Art Gallery, Hastings, UK (2009), London Animation Club, London, UK (2013).

Row Row (2005)

In Row Row a photo of two men in a boat taken in Battersea Park is expanded and contracted both horizontally and vertically. The movement is mapped to a rising and falling soundtrack of creaking oars, creating a 'transparent', or reflexive illusion in which we perceive an on screen motion that approximates rowing but clearly is not. What begins as a semblance becomes a see-saw of pixels, testing the illusion to its limits. This is compounded by the ambiguity of causality with the noise of the oars not the result or product of the boatman’s exertions, but rather the picture seemingly animated by the audio.

Screened at Videolisboa, Lisbon, Portugal (2005), London Animation Club, London, UK (2013).

Quadrangle (2005)

Quadrangle takes as its starting point Richter's Rhythmus '21 (1921). A patch was built to generate quasi-random, trills, runs and staccato bursts of data, punctuated by moments of silence. This information was then mapped to control the animation of the white square, and via MIDI, a synthesizer. As the electronic music starts and stops, so simultaneously the white square performs a synchronised spatial choreography: changing colour, moving across the frame, advancing and retreating, and producing a variety of grid like patterns. 

To offest the synaesthetic, an arbitrary element was introduced by keeping the sound parameters the same throughout the piece, whilst the visual mapping parameters are changed (at various points). The result is to continually question sound and image causality, and counter suggestions of literalness

Screened at: Island Art Film & Video Festival, London, UK (2005), PROG:ME New Media Festival, Brazil (2005), Lumen, Leeds, UK (2006), Visual Music Marathon, Boston, USA (2007).

Engine Trouble (2005)

Engine Trouble pastiches 1970s and ‘80s television commercials for Castrol GTX engine oil, in which liquid and shiny steel entwine, in an attempt to turn a rather unglamorous product into something all but sensual. The visual component was a JPEG of a Harley Davidson engine which was first animated resulting in footage of a swirling mass of metal, that moves between recognisable piston forms and molten abstraction. To produce the sound, a Max software audio oscillator patch was created that scans the centre of the image, and as the picture moves, the frequency rises or falls. The engine sound produced is surprisingly plausible; coughing and spluttering as the image slows.

Screened at: Video under Volcano, Milan, Italy (2006), Cog Collective, London, UK (2006), Camera Obscura, Chipendale, Australia (2007), Memorial Art Gallery, Hastings, UK (2009).

A Rocco Din (2004)

A traditional style of melody helps establish the connection between music and image, before the introduction of an element of visual discord. Popular music contains multiple counterpointed parts: drums, a bass line, a chord sequence, and finally a ‘top’ melody. In contrast, the majority of mainstream films involve one or two points of visual attention within a frame. The music in A Rocco Din is formed of a bass and a treble line. Linking the animation to just one of these, would have created untroubled synchronisation, and this is indeed how the piece starts; but as it progresses, the movement of the image is mapped to both parts, the bass making the image move one way, the treble another. This willfully problematises the viewing experience, and combined with ambiguity as to whether sound is driving image, or vice versa, gives what presents itself initially as a cheery animation an underpinning dialectic.

Screened at: Lux Exposure, London, UK (2004), Exploding Cinema, London, UK (2005), 291 Gallery, London, UK (2005), VideoLisboa, Lisbon, Portugal (2005), Berlin Videonale, Berlin, Germany (2006), Memorial Art Gallery, Hastings. UK (2009), London Animation Club, London, UK (2013).