2002
super 8
sound: processed light bulbs
15 minutes
notes from 2002:
“in 1997, i was in sheffield england, sleeping in a small room in the home of saxaphone player mick beck. it was raining rather loudly, and i woke up out of a dead sleep in the middle of the night and wrote down the phrase “truth is the bell. bell is the truth” and fell back asleep. when i awoke the next morning, i had no idea why i had written this text. a year later, i was in liverpool england to participate in isea 98. i was visiting a large cathedral and the bell ringer showed me a book of ‘scores’ for bell ringing by jasper snowdon. it was written in the 1880’s, (and still apparently in use). these scores were not only very beautiful; but had an uncanny relationship to much of my visual work.
light forms is the result of my merging of snowdon’s visual notation with the short phrase written within my cloud of sleep. around the same i began to think about a film, i was asked to do a performance related to the theme of light, and so i decided to to use the acoustic sounds of light bulbs as my source.
the resulting film/sound work was presented at the singuhr – hoergalerie in parochial, and the light bulbs become ‘bells’ as their sounds floated around a space where bells had always existed.
the visuals in the film consists of two image streams intertwined. the first, shot in black and white, uses a self made system to translate the phrase “truth is the bell, bell is the truth” into a series of hand gestures. the color sequences follow some of the red and blue graphic forms of snowden’s bell scores. the images were created moving colored light bulbs behind stencil cut black construction paper.
here, my interest is not particularly in bells nor lights – but rather how these things can affect my process and hence, the outcome of that process. as a maker i’m interested in the creative path, and how: the limitations of making sound with a lightbulb, the deviation from original intentions in using a ‘score’ as an aesthetic presence, the untranslatable nature of a sign language known only to the ‘speaker’, etc. are able to have a dominant presence in the outcome. the piece is not about lights, nor is it about bells – it is an abstract presence developed through these things, but the goal is for it to simply exist as audible and visual music.”