Unlike the live events, these live mixes are subject to some ‘post-production’ through the editing process and remain frozen in time within the video, rather than being subject to the vagaries of the shifting event as it unfolds. However, in both the live events and the video-texts, an insistent interest remains in the act of construction (as much as in what is constructed), and in an affective3 approach, which eschews narrative and sense-making in favour of an appeal to the senses and feeling faculties. Finally, both manifest a quality of ‘distanced proximity’ (Scott 2016, 94), where the affect that emerges is not necessarily close and intimate, but elusive, moving and chasing through the movements of the practice.
As stated in the introduction, then, this project looked to mobilise the capacities of live intermedial practice in addressing a place – Salford – and began with a hunch about the music and culture of this place, which I wanted to position in relation to contemporary lived experience. As such, the first element I researched in more detail was Salford's musical history.
On a basic level, and as referenced in the introduction, the practice is about mixing and combining – taking disparate materials and media and placing them in conversation, using a range of technological tools. When travelling to a live event, I bring a laptop, enabled with VJ software2 to mix together fragments of footage gathered beforehand. Often, I plug a live-feed camera into this system and come to the event with a set of objects that can be moved under the camera and mixed with the pre-recorded footage.
In addition, a loop pedal and microphone are also employed, allowing me to loop and layer my voice in a variety of ways. A mini-synthesiser means that ‘synthetic’ digitised sound can be generated and sustained, through the touch of a finger, alongside a sampler, with some satisfyingly fat buttons, armed with sonic samples – riffs, beats, spoken word, and abstract sounds. Again, a touch of the finger will activate a sample, which can be sustained and shifted in a variety of ways.
The business of this practice then is how the materials gathered and brought to the event are combined and made manifest as a set of shifting intermedial combinations, generated in the moment and then disappearing, only to be reformulated in new combinations – see montage of live intermediality. This is also true to some extent of the video-texts (see example above) made using these tools. These arise from live mixing of materials, in response to predetermined prompts, ideas, and questions. The longer live mix of sound, image, text, and body is then edited into shorter and more accessible segments of intermediality, in the form of a video.
‘Live intermediality’ is the name I give to a mode of live media practice that I have researched through, explored, and developed over the past five years. The practice has always been a research endeavour, led by inquiry and practised in response to such inquiries. Starting from a wish to explore ‘liveness’ in relation to digital media, the work has insistently interrogated any space that still exists between those two terms and has moved on to explore specifically what it might be about the live mixing of media that generates a discrete performance experience, existing between process and product, between technical activation and performance.