For this video Alberto told me he had something wave-ish in mind. I also had quite similar impressions. The track Utopia Robotz feels blury and like a big field of nearly invisible turbulence. For me it describes more an environment than telling you a literal story, it is more like exploring a landscape of digital micro-organisms.
I wanted to work with the kind of compression artefacts that usually is seen as “poor image quality”. If we want a clear image it can be annoying, but seen as an abstract expression of a medium one might notice beauty in the unpredictable colournoise that implanted itself as resonance of the piece of world we use to record another piece of world.
Noise in general is a hopeful thing for me for me, because if there is something i can define as randomness, i think there is also a bit of free will somewhere (at least observed from this defined perspective … and even though i know that not all noise, maybe none of it, is random).
As base material used recordings of waves i took at Riva Ligure. My grandparents had a house there and last time i was there i filmed some waves. Somehow i actually film waves quite often.
I filtered the video a few times to make the colour-noise more visible and sharpened the areas with obvious compression artefacts. There is always more than one video-layer visible at the same time. The layers are blended in a way that constructive and destructive interference happens, so the waves created subpatterns. Still a result of the waves, but especially in combination with the pointilism-ish colour-noise, these patterns appear random but structured as if some interference-based living mass is doing its thing inside the digital images.
For the silent parts of the song, there are so many waves overlapping that they all together sum up and create a relatively silent picture. Muted though loudness. Only a few peaks where pointing out. After setting this up i over-sharpend the artefacts (again…), kind of hardened them, so that they might survive the compression, than renderd the video and again enhanced the old and the new blurry colour-noise i got through the process.
For the repetitive part in the music i created a loop of a single wave. With the increase in volume of the (audio-)loop i blended more and more into the same-wave-loop that rolls down over and over again and again.
paul simon heyduck
about the video for the track “utopia robotz” from bienoise
2018
Video here
Buy floppy disc here