Flames of Imagination

Business


Do you know why we are interested about visual representations? My personal interest is in all kind of visualizations, which has developed through abstract visuals of music videos in my childhood. What I took away back then was a whole set of expectations about what an image could look like. That is what I miss in TV, and that's why I do what I do in arts. Basically, it is the idea of cinema that isn't driven by storytelling in the conventional sense.

I don't mind narrative; in fact. I love a good narrative, expecially a Hollywood technical quality. Anything is valid as long as you do it right. If the message that's being delivered makes me think, entertains me, makes me laugh or cry, gives me a place to forget, or whatever - then I'm interested.

With abstract visuals we are seeing things now that were unthinkable five years ago. I think this is because a wide audience is being introduced to audio-synchronised abstraction through their computers' music visuazation apps. To me it's common sense that people enjoy watching abstraction, and seeing an interaction between sound and image that isn't necessarily dictated by telling a story.

As displays become brighter, bigger, and flatter, the image becomes environmental, allowing the video to color a room's ambience rather than just deliver information. Today's media is undergoing a metamorphosis as new displays beg for beautiful picture to fill them. So we're now seeing companies offering footage of tropical fish aquariums and slideshows of impressionist paintings for all these HD screens. This market will demand new and fresher content, and VJs are the natural providers.

In a 2003 speech by William Gibson to Director's Guild of America's Digital Day says that cinema began when prehistoric people sat in circles around fire, looked into the flames, and told stories about what they saw. Resulting in a symbolic narrative triggered by the moving abstact flames:

The story of film begins around a fire, in darkness. Gathered around this fire are primates of a certain species, our ancestors, an animal distinguished by a peculiar ability to recognize patterns.
There is movement in the fire: embers glow and crawl on charcoal. Fire looks like nothing else. It generates light in darkness. It moves. It is alive.

They see the faces of wolves and of their own dead in the flames. They crouch, watching the fire, watching its constant, unpredictable movements, and someone is telling a story. In the watching of the fire and the telling of the tale lie the beginning of what we still call film.

With the advent of the digital, which I would date from, approximately, World War Two, the nature of this project begins to become more apparent, more overt; the texture of these more recent technologies, the grain of them, becomes progressively finer, progressively more divorced from Newtonian mechanics. In terms of scale, they are more akin to the workings of the brain itself.