Cloud Construct

Duration: 8:00
Instrumentation: single channel video, stereo audio
Selection: Seen//sound Melbourne Call for Works
Supported by Australia Council For The Arts New Work grant

Program Notes

Cloud Construct is an eight-minute audiovisual process composition. It is part of an ongoing exploration in my work to expose polyrhythmic structures using moving images.In the work, three layers of audio correspond with 3 layers of looped footage. Each of the three layers is based on a simple repeated pattern, which slowly develops over the course of the piece. The complexity in the piece emerges due to the slightly differing lengths of the three patterns – seven-, eight-, and nine-beat loops – causing them to drift out of alignment, cycling through all possible phase positions before finally resolving at the end.

The accelerated footage of passing clouds has been mirrored horizontally to produce a slowly evolving Rorschach-style image. While many of my audio-visual works aim to elucidate the patterns, creating a kind of puzzle for the viewer to solve, Cloud Construct explores a more contemplative application of these techniques; it is not a puzzle to solve, but perhaps more a meditational tool.

My work is frequently inspired by the science of chaos and complexity. In Cloud Construct I find a fascination in the parallel between clouds as textbook examples of chaos in the natural world, and the emergent chaos within a completely deterministic musical process.