videoclips from Instants Chavirés performance with Gert-Jan Prins 15th June 2005 here
when loaded, double-click to play movie (360Kb)
Foreign Correspondence is an ongoing project exploring arbitrary and absolute links between sound and light/image, liveness and playback. It began as an installation at Instants Chavirés in autumn 2004.
"The new images no longer have any outside (out-of-field), any more than they are internalized in a whole...They are the object of a perpetual reorganization, in which a new image can arise from any point whatever of the preceding image... the screen itself, even if it keeps a vertical position by convention, no longer seems to refer to the human posture, like a window or a painting, but rather constitutes a table of information, an opaque surface on which are inscribed 'data', information replacing nature, and the brain-city, the third eye, replacing the eyes of nature. Finally, sound achieving an autonomy which increasingly lends it the status of image, the two images, sound and visual enter into complex relations with neither subordination or commensurability... "
The idea of 'visual music' has a long history. From Bertrand's colour organ of 1760, via Baudelaire's symbolist synaesthesia, to beat-matching club VJ's, people have tried to make images and sound correspond, looking for a unity of the senses.
Once the physical actions of a musician or artist directly affected the sound or the image. Sounds and pictures were the index of a moment in time, a movement of the body. Now, using tiny bit-encoded machines, arbitrary events can be made to correspond. Unexpected combinations characterise our world.
After years of making images respond to music, I wondered what it would be like to make them respond to other sounds I hear in my house or on the street. And what it would be like to write on walls, instead of making pictures. Foreign Correspondence is about writing to sound, and drawing separate experiences together.