asquare

View work here: http://www.asquare.org/work/composition_system/

System for Multiple Compositions on a Theme is a series of videos shot and edited on analogue equipment in 1995 for the sole purpose of experimenting with editing video to create audio compositions. Rather than the norm of composing a video, the image, into a sequence, here the audio was composed and the accompanying image became incidental, secondary.

The re-presentation of the video experiments on the internet not alone documents and expose them to a wider audience than the original analog cassettes but also serves as a means to progress the early video experiments as a website experiment.

The network provides a means to reconfigure the way the work is viewed by changing the artist’s (sole author of the art work) relationship with his audience. The artist, rather than defining a narrative, defines a framework for the art to work within. Experimentation with methods of sending, retrieving and presenting information on the internet, such as the use of html forms and server side scripting allows him to this time construct a system for controlling / viewing the art work rather than an art work that is simply to be viewed. The spectacle of cinema and its audience is replaced by individual user’s, separated and distributed across many spaces / places, each as co-author’s / contributor’s with the artist to their viewing and interpretation of his work.

Above: The web based composition creation interface. Click to view larger images.

The composition creation interface on the website, allows users to actively participate in the composition of the experiments and experience an approximation of the act of originally editing these experiments by the artist. It consists of a grid of nine positions, three across and three down, where any position on the grid can be occupied by any of the nine videos any number of times. This gives a possible 2318107019760 combinations, where…

18 + 18² + 18³ + 18⁴ + 18⁵ + 18⁶ + 18⁷ + 18⁸ = 2318107019760

Videos can be given a parameter to loop, loop back and forth (palindrome) or not loop. Lag, download speed on the internet, as well as video duration is used as a means to offset how the videos will sound / display within the website creating an overlap that is never quite the same.