Digital Alchemy
Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens
Digital media remains effectively static and unchanged by the passing of time, while traditional media patinas, yellows, curls and decomposes in familiar and comforting ways. This quality in addition to the available tools has made interacting with my personal digital archive feel more often like a management activity than the immersion in reflection and insight which I otherwise wish it to be.
Current research
The experiment was to take the digital analogs of alchemic processes in transforming my experience of a stifling accumulated mass, back to something once again dynamic and in service to the present-tense. This was done in particular by attempting to subject the videos through an algorithmic approximation of the first four stages of that process: burning, dissolving, separating, re-combining, and fermenting.
The results were a long series of video collages arrived at through a randomized, aesthetically-drive, and algorithmic process. These short videos juxtapose desperate past moments. In watching many of these results as a single movie, I was able to immerse in past memories in ways which incited reflection and introspection. Through these times I've began to notice my relationship becoming more dynamic to some particularly overwhelming moments in my past.
This exploration has been fascinating, and delivered 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-through each video in its own color channel in 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 remained charged for me with a series of profound suggestions. 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: