granular grind
Posted by: Shannon in Uncategorized, tags: academe, appropriation, music, sound, videoThanks to Christian for introducing me to YouTube Poop. It reminds me of the kinds of collages I’ve made when starting to play with a technology: cassette pause button edits in the 80s, samplers in the early 90s, hard disk editing and granular synthesis in the late 90s. Basically having fun, trying things out, and exploring rhythm, texture and mood in a more or less musical way, but with little regard for convention. Taking whatever happened to be on TV or radio and sculpting it into something resonant.
Here’s a little video I made in 2003, shortly after getting my hands on Sonic Foundry Vegas (now Sony Vegas). It uses a bunch of videos I’d collected from the web (mostly from Stileproject) but isn’t all that different from the video collages I made back in 1993 when I first got access to a SVHS edit suite.
It’s called Four Words by Time Being and appears on the Section Media compilation VIVA [section] which is being rereleased by Alias Frequencies [preview].
I’m currently writing a book chapter on how the now-ubiquitous ‘mash-up’ (in web, video, music, etc) came from the same musical underground that gave us ‘culture jamming’ ie the Evolution Control Committee, Negativland, John Oswald. I’m also looking at relationships between collage, granular synthesis and cultural granularity.
It will probably become part of my dissertation, and may be the kick start that I need, as I’m at that awkward stage of having to redefine the paramaters of my research. For example, I’m probably not going to go ahead with the wiki site that I’d planned, as the Web2.0 landscape is developing too rapidly and I don’t want to make something that will be redundant. It may be more useful to concentrate on analyzing and ‘mashing up’ existing (and emerging) sites, as well as being involved in the development of such sites, as I am with the ABC’s ‘Pool’ project. We’ll see…
