OLYMPIA Vn.0 - VIDEO

RESEARCH & CONTEXT

I found my initial starting point at a visit to Saatchi - Oleg Kulik's Deep into Russia #1 (1993). Head in a cow desire to die and be born again as something new - an eternal loop.

This led me to finding some of his earlier work including Armadillo for Your Show 2003 which was a performance piece based on spectacle alone. With these pieces in mind, I hit the books.

In Groove Tube, it described how to truly watch something the audio had to be unrelated. So from the advice given in the book, I decided that the audio should not match up to the visuals so that viewers could fully engage in the watching. The difference between cinema and art film is that you need to pay attention to an art film. Cinema can be, and usually is, mindlessly consumed. Forcing the awareness of being a viewer, I tried to not match up the movements to the music but to really take this to the extreme, the looping doesn’t match up equally. The audio content is longer than the visual content so whilst it loops, it’s more of a round that stretches further and further away from the original pairing of audio to visual the further you progress through the film. So as a result of questioning the purposes between cinema and experimental video art, the ideas discussed in Groove Tube lead me to making a never ending cycle of content playing in rounds.

With an idea that I wanted to create content without meaning, I decided I needed to strip back to basic concepts to make aesthetically pleasing content. But since beauty is subjective I thought it would make more sense to appeal to basic human nature rather than personal taste. This lead me to bright colours, high contrasting lights, movement and I also looked into our desire for fractal fluency aka things that repeat on a microscopic scale.

Following on from the concept of repeating, my infatuation for Manet’s Olympia will never die. Which naturally led me back to my final piece in FE which included a projection of a film centred around the start of my ego death and was titled Olympia. I appropriated some of the footage from this as it would both resonate with the eternally looping connection of repeats as well as having the basic appeal of pretty coloured lights. I eventually began to appropriate more from my own archives for the audio. This came mainly from a jam session held in Reading with members of bands that I can’t seem to escape, but also directly from the work of KT King, one of said Reading band members.

The Olympia concept is also where the name came from for this piece. V2.0 would have seemed false as the whole premise of the ‘original’ painting is that it wasn’t the first and it wouldn’t be the last. Vn.0 was a subtle comment on the infinite updated versions of things we have to download as technology overpowers the simpler arts like painting.

TECHNICAL

Where it all came from:

Readipop - Old Phone Archives

Fractal Geometry - Fractal Architect 4, Scale, Online generators etc

Demob Happy & Valeras - Leggria

Palm Honey Jam Session - Old Phone Archives

I’m Ian Isolated Vocals - KT King

Played with speed/duration, Eisenstein’s theory of montage, sampling and layering audio

REFLECTION

Definitely more to be done with this project. 

Had compatibility problems with working with different versions of Premiere Pro which meant I then couldn’t import clips into AfterEffects which could have benefited the clips of Demob/Valeras quite drastically. 

Again faced problems out of my control when original event, Spring Gathering - a psytrance squat with fire dancers, circus performers etc, was shutdown. As these events are few and far between it was impossible to find another one within the time frame so when I do make it to more of these events I will be sure to capture as much as I can for future references. 

I had originally wanted to include audio from interviews I’d done with Reading or otherwise bands but found I didn’t have enough content to communicate the idea of repetition clearly enough. Though, as I build up my portfolio of interviews I can revisit this. 

Archived phone footage was very successful and I shocked myself at how abstracted I could make it with very basic knowledge of Premiere. 

The other major strength in the project was learning entirely new software to generate the fractal geometry - despite the constant crashing and a lot of trial and error. 

I think creating longer looping videos is something I’d like to do again as I feel it has a lot of potential.