I’ve done many things this year, but this one here was something new – I was asked to be part of an impro ad-hoc trio and contribute with… visuals!

I’ve done *something* like that before in October where I mounted some sound-responsive LED disco lights and filmed everything through my analog prism-filtered cameras while looping everything back through a projector, but this time I wanted to try out visuals that move and interact with what’s happening onstage.
Combined, if possible, with the two basic approaches I use in photography:

1. coincidence = room for improvisation
2. create something digital with the help of something analog

Uff.

I’ve heard Emil Storløkken play, and I’ve seen Michael Aspli dance. They’re both amazing artists and improvisers, so I set my own bar pretty high in order to add something equally enticing.

I have this experiment called “film soup” going on for a few years in which I shoot 35mm film, get the negatives developed, bathe the slides in household chemicals, and then scan the results. What I love about this is that, depending on the chemicals used and the way you treat the slides, it creates lovely random color bursts, dystopian landscapes, outer space scenarios, and overall unique, organic and mystical structures and textures. Great for album artworks or posters or any other static medium that asks for a little oomph.

But I rarely found time to continue this project since I’ve been pretty busy filming and editing videos this year.

Waaaaaaaiiiiiiit… filming! Moving images! Animations!! So consequently I thought: Why not try to take that whole shabang a step further and make movies out of these static images?

Here are some of the slides I used:

So I created 12 single movies by layering the scans, playing around with opacities, movement and color levels, and whoa maaaan did that look trippy!
Using these movies as the basic material during the performance, I blended them into each other, depending on what I heard and saw and felt. It was super duper challenging, but also so beautiful to watch if every now and then I zoomed out, grabbed the camera and became part of the audience for a few moments.

What I immediately learned from this: 12 files are not enough to offer a decent variety of potential paths to go during an impro performance, so in 2021 I will shoot more film, destroy it, animate it, and create more material to work with.

Anyway, here’s what it looked like:

And a livestream:

https://www.facebook.com/sonic.transmissions.records/videos/391105322193742