Brilliant Noise

Here is a look at the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor has brought together some of the sun's unseen moments. These images in their raw form, reveal the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise.Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots containing additional information, by satellites which are re-organised to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies.More here.

Wind,Sand and Stars

One minute stories

John Cage :principles of Indeterminancy
New aspects of form in Instrumental and Electronic music:Three notes

Structure of Feeling

"the distilled residue of the organization of the lived experience of a community over and above the institutional and ideological organization of the society"
Raymond Williams

dots in space

John Cage talks about silence and sound.Exploring Duchamp's understanding of music as spatial and Kant's philosophy that sounds are nothing, never expecting them to be more than what the really are.
“People expect listening to be more than listening. I love sounds, just as they are, and don’t expect them to be more than they are. The sound experience which I prefer to all others is the experience of silence.”

Cage

Listen to him here.

Arvo Part

Arvo Pärt is an Estonian classical composer. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has been working in a minimalist style that employs a self-made compositional technique called tintinnabuli. His music also finds its inspiration and influence from the Gregorian chant.Thats him there breaking down the silence.

I am beginning to realize that the best possible way to identify with the nuances of film language is through the process of editing. Having scripted, directed and edited my films, I have come to that understanding evidently .What one understands of the relationship between one shot to another or what is that invisible thought that can be made to stand out.
It is the silent noise that you wiggle out from the present exception of the ordinary. Then you have a sound that is strangely discordant to its context, and yet it could visually transport you elsewhere.
Whether its visual imagery or sound, the unintentional suddenly emerges . So it is possible to listen to human sounds, of people bustling out of a club, the subtle clink of cutlery, chairs dragging against the floor, a shutter banging to a close and footsteps fading away into the distance at the end of a track and you are visually transported into that scenario, by receiving those noise elements.
This then only gets better. Discordantly shot footage can consist of immense latent material and perfect shots can be affected to meet the essential context or play a parallel.

Never Just Looking

As I continue pulling threads from what I have been previously writing, here is another example of never just looking.Susan Meiselas is a renowned photographer working with Magnum Photos, France.Take a look at this excerpt from her work, which is being exhibited in Paris by Magnum Photos called 'Never Just Looking, here.

Seen above is a photo-narrative I particularly find interesting.A compelling equation of emptiness,physical movement and silence.This was photographed by Elliot Erwitt in 1968 as part of a photo-documentation called 'Unseen' at Biarritz, France.

Photos Courtesy : Magnum Photos

Collecting all the lifafas

So, the movement has kickstarted and will be up soon!
Watch out for this space.

Observing Design

Here is an interesting article forwarded by Tanu ,by designer and teacher, Ken Botnick, who was incidently a Fulbright Fellow at NID, National Institute of Design,Ahmedabad in the year 2005-06,on the Subtle Technology of Indian Artisanship.
He echos what I have continuously felt while travelling,working on projects, meeting up with varied artisans and having discussions with them about their work in Rajasthan.
He has very valid things to say.Hear him out here .

Breaking away from the restraints of the metaphor

I have been throwing this word around for the past week without doing any justice to the clarity of its meaning, so much so that i have been thought to be speaking greek (which by the by I started learning from a friend yesterday)
When Milann and I were studying film at the National Institute of Design,we decided one day to wake up at 5am and go out for a field recording.So we smuggled a Tascam and mike out of the institute and reached the railway station, convinced that it was the only place that could provide equity to our first field recording.
And then the discoveries were spell binding.
Often times, in my experience, I have found that the sudden appearance of a visual image or sound, which has its emergence out of context, leaves me baffled to the extent that I have to pick up that camera and shoot or catch that sound somehow. Maybe hold onto that particular body language of a person by means of a still photograph.

So as such there is a nature-culture binary code in place, through which one can find certain unintentional structures, that can be paradoxically fabricated to some extent. Point being to bring about a blurring of the edges of your own aesthetics. Sharawadgi can be understood as a contrast from the very banality it is based on. It belongs to the sounds of everyday life. It will come only by a conscious deconstruction of contexts. By breaking away from the true meaning. It is the actualization of an impossible potentiality.

So the new imagination or the transported imagination once you find it, becomes a way by which one accesses the unlimited. To simplify, it is to challenge the imagination or the transported imagination, every time you get an interesting visual or sound idea, and you play around with the possibilities, so that you realize the potential it could accomplish within that medium or even without.

For instance, once the shot is taken, it would be interesting to analyze what triggered the thought process in the first place.Was it conceived before or after the shot, if so were there other elements that came into focus while one was taking the shot.It could also be that everything fell into place once the shot was taken.That would be one way of looking at it.
The other would be to question the medium itself.So I am sitting at a restaurant, or better still I am on a shoot, watching people work. This is the one time, people are off their guard, working seamlessly towards a common goal., And I pick out this one guy whose body language is of particular interest to me. Our resident photographer is busy, involved in her own thought process, taking photographs of the shoot and the crew and whatever else that strikes her mind.
I am excited to know how those photo-narratives will turn out.At the same time, I wonder if it was really that essential to capture that body language through the means of the photograph.Perhaps I could apply another medium here.My first thought was a charcoal drawing.Or maybe I could sketch him on the back pages of my notebook.Or better still, put him in a film. Now how would I evoke his body language in a film?

Acoustic Sharawadgi

So,a certain essayist by the name of Sir William Temple came up with the term sharawadgi in an essay he wrote in 1685 called 'Upon the Gardens of Epicurus'dealing with the Japanese culture of gardening.And he wrote,

'But their greatest reach of imagination is employed in contriving figures, where the beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts that shall be commonly or easily observed: and, though we have hardly any notion of this sort of beauty, yet they have a particular word to express it, and, where they find it hit their eye at first sight, they say the sharawadgi is fine or is admirable, or any such expression of esteem.'

And then by the time we reach the 18th century,we have Jean-Francois Augoyard and Henry Torgue introducing it in their book'Sonic Experience'And they put it like this,
'the sonic wandering of the flaneur listening to the multiple sounds of the city bears the potentiality of encountering such experiences of the sublime, of a formless shape, apparantly disordered, with no intention, that hides its artistic elaboration from eye and ear.'

Time moves slowly today.The onset of evening.4pm.Traversing through my silent soundscape.
Listening to the last set,Brody in The Pianist.Passing thought.It would be fun casting Mr.Brody.I'd go mad with detail and movement,silence and speech,breathing,stillness.Someday!

For now,reaching back into the silence of sound.Taking off from a thesis I wrote a year back,I had a mad urge to dig it back into form.It was already looming over my head,a dark cloud in the wee hours of the morning, I slept fitfully.

The past weeks have gone by listening to a load of music.Too much information meted out.All I could do was to ween out singular sounds.The only way I could make sense of my listening.Pull out,listen,put back,take the whole.No structures.Dwindling shapes.

And so I found Andreas Bick who was pouring out my thoughts in his space.I sat wallowing on the side.Then I dove in.
Bick,composer and sound artist based in Berlin, writes about sound related things in general.He puts it out there interestingly,says, silent listening is about the fringes of music, the periphery where music turns into sheer sound- concrete, wild, sometimes stunning.Am in that silent space,the periphery.
Am coming back with more..