Symposium 2

Print test of dream images

As a test, I printed out some different images, I wanted to see how they work as physical objects. I used a Plotter and uncoated paper.
The images with bright colours are working better than the two in the first colon. The saturated colours have a really good appearance. The two images from the first, colon have to be colour corrected before printing.

Status of video sequenses

It is time to make a status of the video material I have made.
When I started the voice replacement test, I had a kind of breakthrough; I saw the possibility of how to combine words, sound, live footage and animation.
The split-screen (triptych) seems as a great method to let different scenarios compliment each other and to drive the story forward.
My most important experience while making those sequences are the speed talking and thereby the acting. I found out that I have to slow down almost everything: the speak, the animation and the live footage. Repeating of sentence or words works fine in my fragmented dream universe.
The actors’ pause and movements play a bigger role than I first suspected. Many pauses slow down the speed and add in suspense. Body movements add in dynamics.
The idea with the replacement of voices allows the character to be old, young, a man, women, boy or girl at the same time, just like in dreams where the dreamer have all the roles. At the same time, the actors and voices are all family members, they are my genetic material it could be me as young or old, the similarity and my big family is a gift I want to take advantage of.
The use of text incorporated in the sequences takes too much focus from the images and sound. I still have to find out how to work with the text.
In one case I tested the use of music. I have the feeling of open a door to a field with endless solutions and emotions controlled by music. It could be really fine, but I have to find my own sound -way.
Using a reallocation as backgrounds work fine in the scene with the man on the beach, probably because he is standing there and the boy is running there. I do not think it works that well in the latest test (May 17th).
The recordings I made with fish worked really fine and have to be more present.

Next step is to start playing with projectors and sound.

Playing with cut out words

My entire list of words is 143. The words are based on the 20 dream images I made.
I have made some more test with the words:
Alphabetic order
Number of letters going from few letters to several
Ten columns (ten words on a line creates a poem).

It turned out very constructed, and I missed the magic. Then I printed the list and cut out the words and used the law of change by dropping them from a distance. I organised the words; in alphabetic order, and in order to make sense. But still, I felt it was too constructed.

With my smartphone, I made some recordings in slow-motion. The production value was too bad, but I could frame grab images during the sequence. The drop made the selection and at the same time, the drop made a composition which I found interesting.

Voice replacement test now with atmosphere sound

I am testing the mixe of footage; dancing girl, scissors and the talking head. I am also testing the background sound. By repeating the same sound bites, it creates a rhythm without being music. It is a rhythm and a breath.
Maybe it is my direction to go, sound wise; using kind of non sound like a breath before a word, a footstep before it touches the ground etc.

A test of mixed footage on a real location.

Social Dreaming Matrix

I came to talk to Mia about my master project, she was very curious about my work with my dreams because she had some interesting experiences from her own field as an anthropology. We decided to meet.

Mia gave me a short introduction to Social Dreaming Matrix and its founder Gordon Lawrence

Social Dreaming is a way of working with dreams where the focus is on the dream and not the dreamer, where dreams are shared amongst people who come together solely for this purpose. With Social Dreaming, the meaning of a dream is about the broader world in which one lives. In a Social Dreaming event, participants are invited to offer their dreams and, through association, explore the possible social meanings contained within them.

It is about how a group’s unconscious manifests itself in dreams. It is not individual therapy it is a group experiment; a number of people gathered together around a theme, their dreams come into each other and it is possible to draw a connection a kind of common unconsciousness which come to the light and can be used for discussion and social development.

In the form of an anthropologist, Mia participated as a facilitator at an international two-day long conference in 2015 made for organization psychologists. The theme was “sibling relationships”. They looked at the workplace/ organisation as a family with constructed siblings (colleagues) relationship.

From being sceptical, Mia was positively surprised.
She wrote down the dreams of the contributors.
One common dream subject was broken glass, she had a view in a dream of broken glass herself during the conference.
A hypothesis could be that it was a few days after the terror attack in Copenhagen, a subject that was not touched at the conference at all but that it affected peoples mind.
Dreams are like compound fragments and in this session, common experiences, from awake state seem to impact the outcome.

We talked about my dreams that I had been a kind of Matrix my self – my MA project is focusing on my dreams, my dreams are started to be about my MA project.
I showed the videos I made and explained my method – building up a pool of elements, words, footage, voices and now the videos and using the material as changeable fragments.
I explained that the elements mixed into new constellations can make hidden messages from the unconscientious. Interesting to compare that with the pool of dream-notes Mia got from the contributors and interesting if it is possible to work with other peoples dreams.
We agreed that there is much to explore in the field of Social Dreaming Matrix and visualisation – an interesting subject in the light of art and anthropology.

 

Conversation and advice from Finn Markwardt

Finn is a sound designer and musician. Previously we have been working together on many different tv formats, the last cobbles of years we had organized and held workshops for design students.

I wanted Finn’s response to my master project, especially to the sounds and voices from my voice replacement tests.
His first response watching the sequences was that he doesn’t miss anything according to the sound.

He mentioned that he knows that I’m working with analogue stuff/material as a great part of my working style, therefore he suggested that I should keep going in that direction also according to the sound. Make a body of sound sequences – the same as I do with the visual material, a pool of material to pick from.

He saw and listened to voice replacement test 03, where I tested the use of music in combination with moving images. And he said: The piano adds in the mood. The clicking folie sound does not have any emotional impact on me.
Using music combine and glue the pieces together. A system, a rhythm make things more predictable and make it more easy to edit.

It could be interesting to combine a specific sound to each scene or element and edit more randomly, to scale the contrast; like heavy punk and silence. In general, do the same to the sound as to the images.

Lip sync is important, I have to be more accurate while matching up sound and image.

When I’m a little further, he encouraged me to think about the final show; how high can the sound be, is it a good idea to let people wear earphones and in this case how many?

From images to words

I transformed all my twenty dream images to words. My method was: what do I see, what did I hear and which feelings, emotions or mood do I remembered from the dream.
I’m not sure about next step or if there should be a next step. I had some interesting conversations with Cecilia Zwick Nash and Christina Funder about poem and system. I had a good experience last time I worked with the words, where I created the poem I used in my voice replacement tests, but I’m not interested in repeating the same session. I have to think it over.
Reading the text (on the yellow background) horizontally makes funny new word constellations.

 

Conversation with Cecilia Zwick Nash

I invited my self to my old friend Cecilia’s place in order to talk about my master project, to be more specific; my work with text and talk. Cecilia is an actor, poet, writer and she grew up in Drakabygget, a spectacular artist community, among painters and poets in the seventies and eighties in the south of Sweeden.
I wanted her response to my test sequences of voice replacement. She found it interesting; the visual style the way of acting.
She encouraged me to let the sound follow the image, like what I did in the scene where a cello follows the old man on the beach.
She suggested me to think about the actors/characters having an argument where the timing and speed of lines increases and decreases, like a verbal fight. Where the talking characters create a space while talking from one screen to another.
We talked about using text or not. Cecilia showed me some books of the poem called sound poem. The text is used as visual elements as well as text. The compositions of words are like notes for sound; small size=low sound etc. We talked about having a system or not. Cecilia explained that the idea was not having a system, I mentioned that cut-words, mixed typography, white paper and not having a system are a kind of system.

She liked the three masked men on a line; the tiny difference in their movement and talks. I told her that I one the first hand was annoyed because of the head moves but after found them essential for the sequence. It leads us to talk about chance operation/coincidence. My experiences instruct people, until now, is: say a little and see what happen. Cecilia told about Situationisterne, an art group from 1957 which her parents were part of.
The engine was: spontaneity, improvisations, chaos, turmoil, speech choir, music, etc. and using the unpredictable. The intention was to create a larger living space for an anti-authoritarian dialogue culture by bringing the imagination to power to bring up the rule between ruler and ruler. They were against the fine culture and the convention, the situationists focused on the individual situation and wanted to abolish the difference between the artist and the audience, between everyday life and art.
They infused the concept of “play” as a value criterion in relation to the art

Voice replacement test 7

This is a test of repeating the same sentence in different ways.
The phrase is from a dream.