Digital Alchemy
Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens
Digital media remains effectively static and unchanged by the passage of time, while traditional media patinas, yellows, curls, and decomposes in familiar and comforting ways. Because of this—and the tools available—interacting with my digital archive often feels more like management than the immersion in reflection and insight I wish it to be.
Current research
The experiment was to apply digital analogs of alchemic processes to transform my experience of a stifling accumulated mass back into something dynamic and in service to the present. This was done by attempting to process the videos through an algorithmic approximation of the first four stages of that process: burning, dissolving, separating, recombining, and fermenting.
The results were a long series of video collages created through a randomized, aesthetically driven, algorithmic process. These short videos juxtapose disparate past moments. Watching many of them as a single movie allowed me to immerse myself in memories in ways that incited reflection and insight. Over time, I’ve noticed my relationship becoming more dynamic with some particularly overwhelming memories.
This exploration has been fascinating, yielding intriguing and promising results so far.
Surpassing the personal
With a selection of video files from the last 4 years:
- Choose a random color channel (Red, Green, or Blue) from 1 frame each of 3 randomly selected videos from the period
- Output a new RGB video which plays each video though in its own color channel as a single video montage
- Degrade, transform, and/or change the colorspace of the final output video
The resulting collages begin to become more abstract to a general viewer, while they remain charged with a series of profound suggestions for me. Additionally, with progressive transformation and decomposition, I found the results increasingly lifted from the personal into something both increasingly abstract and aesthetically captivating.
Most of the results below are from later stages of decomposition, while as you scroll down you will find images that are from earlier in the process. In all cases the images here are screenshots from 30 second - 5 min long video clips: