Suonno string quartet, spatialisation design (2017)
The letters refer to the correspondent sections in the score
(available at https://core.musicfinland.fi/composers/paola-livorsi)
Listen to the piece in the section Other works
Live processed video as a component of musical composition in the context of contemporary music, in the cases of Suonno and The End of no Ending
The moving image for Suonno and The End of no Ending used techniques borrowed from the experimental film traditions, especially from 'structural film practices' of the 1970's. The use of looping, reusing images, accentuating the materiality of film were used in underlining the feel in Suonno.
The screen in an unconventional aspect ratio was hovering from left to right and back again in a meta-loop of position in front of the viewer.
The macro-photography done for The End of no Ending focused on the details of the human body creating skin landscapes akin to desert imagery and of eyelashes reminding of fata morgana oases.
The images tried to convey a haptic feeling similar to the experience of looking through a microscope, hence the circles, where the viewer looking through is faced with something not seen in the everyday. The images were at times blurred to intensify the 'haptic' effect to engage senses other than the visual.
Both videos were trying to trigger the senses not usually assumed to be active during looking at moving image and access the senses of touch, smell and taste and thereby enhance the listening experience in a way that may not reflect the use of video by present day composers, where the image is under the full control of the music, almost in a cause and effect relation, as in works by Simon Steen-Andersen.
Associative live stream of obscured images play an important part in my practice, they ask the viewer for an interpretation and hopefully open other, non-visual gateways to help, like memory which engages other senses. This tendency of unclear imagery was recognized and elaborated on as a trait of cross-cultural filmmakers making images in their surrogate culture by Laura U. Marks, in her book The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, Duke University Press 2000.
Unaware of her reaserch, which mostly focuses on filmmakers from post-colonial countries living in Canada, US and Britain, I have been making moving images in-between cultures as a Polish immigrant from Canada living in Finland, developing my aesthetic in similar directions.
The End of no Ending is borrowing from different cultures, different points of views that are existing and are more and more a part of the Western culture, due to recent events, and come together here to form a multisensory experience.
Marek Pluciennik (2018)
