the outcome is unforeseen

"An experimental action is one the outcome of which is unforeseen". – John Cage

An experimental collaboration interpreting sound through visual art. Through the process of looking and listening, the project hopes to engage the audience in a dialogue about why these mediums are so often separated.
Through structuralizing the process of listening, my technique is to translate the musical moment into shape, the musical mood into negative and positive space, and the playfulness of sound into representative animals, creating a surreal landscape. These landscapes are populated with statuesque people which represent the living presence of composers within their music. These landscapes do not aim to be didactic but to engage in a third level of conversation with the viewer, whose perception becomes the unknown outcome.

Each piece is based around sketches made while listening to the music. These sketches aimed to translate the most prominent sound, or series of sound into a shape. This beginning decision created the composition of the piece as horizontal, vertical, spiraling chaotically or organized pillars. The most depictive of all of these was the motion of “Saat” where I aimed to replicate the digital graphic spectrum through a graph of buildings.

Within this perceived musical shape I tried to capture the mood of the piece. Darker pieces, such as “Underneath the sea” and Relic (Iron) had to retain patterns that could be represented through motions of white. “Iron”’s musical fusion of heavy spurts of noise and prolonged silence, lead to a fusion of dark patches with empty space and “Insignificant Cent” became a playful and open space.

The third focus, the human element, was added both for visual interest and to demonstrate the presence of the human hand in electronically manufactured music. Often in music we forget the importance of the hand of the composers. I chose to represent the composers as statuesque viewers of their own beautiful creations

Lastly, each of these natural environments is based on an imagined creature I feel exists within the compositions. In “Croaking” and “Insignificant Cent” a sound clip of frogs croaking made the decision simple, but in the remaining three the chosen creatures are based entirely off my imagined perspective.

This process, much like story telling, changes with each viewer’s perception. “The Outcome is Unforeseen” aims to be experimental both in action and title, and question both imagined and perceived sound. Each piece is developed to stand independently as my own artistic creation, as well as in unison with the music.