ISCO: REMIX: Videos for Airports
Assignment:
Create a Remix, in which the content and form are reflected in each other.
The original(s) should be recognizable, but you should think about saying something new in your reframing/remixing of the original material.
The original(s) should be recognizable, but you should think about saying something new in your reframing/remixing of the original material.
My response, 'Videos for Airports':
My piece is an installation for 6 screens and 6 speakers, each screen being tethered to a speaker which sits on the floor below it. On each screen is a simple looped animation consisting only of a bright yellow rectangle, the size of the entire screen, abruptly popping up on the screen and fading out to a bright green rectangle behind it. As the yellow rectangle pops up, the sound of a sine wave is played on the speaker below it, and as the yellow fades away the sound fades out.
Each sine wave is one perfect fourth down from the one coming out of the speaker to its left, and each screen pulses and fades yellow at a rate of about one second slower than the one to its left.
The basic idea behind this was to tie minimal music to minimal sculpture and minimal video art in a way that they all work together naturally. Things remixed:
Steve Reich's Phase Pattern music
Brian Eno's "Music for Airports"
Dan Flavin's light sculptures
Tony Conrad's "The Flicker"
I was asked in class why I chose the colors that I did, and why I chose such a minimal color scheme. The piece is intended to create a soothing and pleasant mood in as clear and direct a way as possible, and I feel, like the artists I'm referencing, that the best way to do this is to use as few elements as possible, and make the relationship between those elements so clear, that the viewer, regardless of his or her understanding of of the works referenced, or the greater cultural picture the work fits into, has to do as little thinking as possible to understand the feeling I'm trying to evoke.
I chose green and yellow largely by the process of elimination. Using blues to represent calm is something of a cliche. Reds imply tension and hunger. Orange represents fire and warmth in such an obvious way it also makes me nervous of running into cliche color usage territory. Black and white are too stark and too sterile. There's both warmth and coldness in bright green and bright yellow, but not too much that their goal seems as obvious and the viewer will so quickly "get" the work that they'll grow bored and walk away.
Using more than two colors, which here really only represent a positive and negative, would have only clouded the viewer's experience. This piece isn't about contrast, and adding more elements than necessary would go against that.
