I started to explore fractals and the Mandelbrot set soon after I read about them in A.K. Dewdney's article in the August, 1985 issue of Scientific American. The concept of infinite recursion is still fascinating to me: The deeper you look, the more complicated the forms become. Philip Brazer approached me with music that he thought would work with my animated sequences. His music sets these fractals in a haunting, floating stasis that I never want to leave.
1999 video 16:14 minutes
for one to three viewers, to be watched in a darkened room, after 11pm
(Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty are sitting together under a tree, talking:)
PP: What do you think security is, Chuck?
CB: Security… It's when you're a little kid, and you've been somewhere with your parents, and it's night, and you're riding home in the car, and you can sleep in the back seat. You don't have to worry about anything, your parents are in the front seat, and they do all the worrying. They take care of everything….
PP: That's real neat!
CB: But it doesn't last. Suddenly you're grown up, and it can never be that way again!
PP: Never?
CB: Absolutely never!
PP: Hold my hand, Chuck!!
2002 video 2:15 minutes
This video is a piece of pure visual music: a synchronous visual and musical canon. I don't look for a correspondence between tone and color — that's too reductionist. The correspondence I make is on a the level of a musical and visual gesture. "Canon" is my first proof of this visual music theory, of how this correspondence can work. Each musical phrase corresponds to a visual movement: in this case, a filling of the visual plane with a color. The color fields are flat, corresponding to an unadorned melody, and the animated transitions give a visual form to the musical form. The animation is offset in time and composited atop itself to create a visual analog to a musical canon. Each visual layer fills the plane just as each musical tone of each voice is heard. Harmony of counterpoint is achieved visually with these overlapping layers. Is this what chords look like? Perhaps only under this method of visualizing music. I know that many have tried to formulate a strict mapping of image to sound, but I refuse to develop or use a literal system of correspondence between sound and image. Instead, I try to match the style and movement of the image and sound in a more intuitive fashion.
In the Moment 2003 video 5:30 minutes
In the Moment is a video illustration of a brief ecstatic trip; one which lasts only an instant. In the normal course of a day, one can experience a glimpse of the sheer joy of living, and of the beautiful fabric of nature. It lasts for only an instant, and it is indescribable in words. I sometimes get these flashes while in nature, and other times they happen while experiencing artwork, or just in an inspired moment. In the Moment is an attempt to portray this kind of experience. For this piece, I used a technique of processing video by super-imposing successive frames. Each frame becomes a layering of time. This creates a blurring or trailing of the images.
