How does music change the way we interpret images that are neutral in content?

That’s it. That’s the pitch – not that it was so easy to pin it down in the first place.

In doing this we aimed to create a single video, composed of various shots of the city, to be overlaid with 6 different audio tracks: 5 of various genres, one with an atmos/native audio track. The video doesn’t follow any particular narrative but is linked through the cut by various graphic elements – an emphasis on line, and motion within the frame driving (😏) certain cuts. Within this, there are various particular paths we edited that the eye can follow (mainly through the many passersby), though these aren’t necessarily the dominant through-lines of the work.

Our footage took particular visual inspiration from excerpts of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) and Chantal Akerman’s News From Home (1977). Though these both feature a whole lotta voice-overs and languid letter-reading, our focus centered around the emotional connection we have to music (maybe these voice-overs are something we can focus on next time?). Moments of Koyaanisqatsi (1982) kept popping into my head during workshopping and while its visuals are similar in content to the former examples, their scale is much more grandiose, epic (though its musical ideas may prove particularly insightful going forward) [just watched a trailer – this film feels so haunted]. Korsakow, as noted, is a more useful tool in breaking down larger parts/themes/ideas as opposed to sweeping, hyper-cinematic spectacle (though I’m sure someone could put it to good use in that area).

Koyaanisqatsi (1982) dir. Godfrey Reggio

Our attempts to capture the mundanity of the city proved fruitful, Darcy’s DSLR owns at recording really expressive nighttime footage. Our visuals attempted to capture an image of a city that’s always moving, always in motion, with hundreds of working parts moving back and forth (literally across the frame). Banality exists within this motion too – these are simple actions (walking, driving), neutral in tone – and the various music we overlaid (original compositions also by Darcy, the GOAT) works to aurally represent different, often disparate moods.

Our work responds to notions of modularity insofar as we used the fragmentary nature of Korsakow to create a large, semi-randomised chain of smaller, modular parts. Within these parts are more modular pieces – our single video was made up of a composite of twelve separate shots cut together using Premiere. From there, we added an audio track to each then tagged these in Korsakow to have the neutral, atmos/native audio video play first with the remaining 5 tagged to randomly show up in the tray below. This sequencing ensures that each experience is different – though a minor feat, the order in which each viewer experiences the 6 set fragments can in itself produce and/or complicate a potential emotional response. Here, variability plays a part within the project, though not to its fullest extent. Much of the limitations of our work come from not using Korsakow to its full potential. As evidenced by other groups’ work in the presentations, there is much that can be done with the software beyond our project. In the future, I think that creating more parts (dependent on what we choose to produce going forward of course) will be beneficial, enhancing the interactivity thus forming a more engaging and expressive piece of media. More keywords – a larger tangle of fragments.

In response to our pitch feedback, following the trajectory we’ve (Darcy and I) followed so far – the ways that music affects us emotionally and how we respond to this – looking at creating something of a larger-scale composition of various musical (or non-musical) sounds seems very interesting. To “create infinite compositions through finite parts”, I think Sophie said.

I’m just gonna leave this here. 

How Does Your City Make You Feel? (2018) by Darcy Read, Denise Wang & Sam Harris

google drive link

My terrible planning and organisational skills kept me from getting to class on the Monday but I caught up on the week’s reading, Soar’s ‘Making (with) Korsakow’, outside of class and I pulled a quote to help guide myself through the reading.

“Korsakow films require attention and a reasonable investment in time without distractions.”

This is definitely something I noticed in my experience with projects created in the software. At every moment I’m aware of how much time I’m committing to certain things and I’m always asking myself internally whether it’s worth my time – this is part of the reason why I can’t hold myself to committing to something like The Witcher 3. I don’t have the damn time!! I can’t bring myself to invest in the fantasy of its world – there’s a thousand films I could be watching instead (I’ll never see them all, sure). There’s so much to consume, always on offer (especially given the proliferation of subscription-based services like Netflix and Spotify that posses boundless ends of “””””””content””””””). I find it hard to invest myself within the game’s world while the thousands of quests available in game float around me, uncompleted. This is why I’m always in a rush, always finding something to fill my time. In relation to Korsakow, I think it’s my unfamiliarity with the platform that gives it this uncertainty. If I commit a whole lot of my time to one project, eg. Ellis Island, do I trust it to reward me with something in the end – will I be full of insight, enlightened?; will I come out the other side dazed and confused?; somewhere in the middle?

In applying these ideas to our project, I can see how creating something that is initially simple in form could be attractive. Giving users a clear layout of the potential possibilities that are drawn within the project is good way of battling this rabbit-hole weary fatigue – though I don’t think there necessarily has to be this binary. Soar’s own Ceci N’est Pas Embres presents an enticing, multi-faceted Korsakow project (and of a scale that I would like to work towards in the future).

For our consultation in week 7, we presented a(n even more) more refined idea of our project. We looked back at the ways that modularity and variability could function within our project – how we can use these ideas within Korsakow to create a work that would function as an engaging piece of new media. We worked on constraints and settled on ‘line’ as a defining aesthetic descriptor and worked towards finding ways of capturing this within the city in a way that built a rhythm (that could then be complemented by the music).

(or: Learning What The Bloody Hell Korsakow Can Do)

Scale here is important: with Korsakow, we’re not setting out to create the most ambitious crossover event in the history of cinema; Korsakow is designed to give meaning/importance/significance to the small moments – the small stories, experiences, places – rather than large narratives. It’s for deconstructing the big into smaller fragments, isolating certain themes or ideas or moments, and from there, linking them together into non-linear sequences (ie. Hannah’s cool deconstruction of Sans Soleil – particularly inspiring work).

In the reading for week 6, Anna Weihl talks about Korsakow as a way of creating:

• small stories/worlds
• a networked world
• multilinearity
• uncertainty

Uncertainty here is key. Hannah used the internet as an example of a way to distinguish the non-linearity of a Korsakow project: when you click a link on the internet it can take you to one place; when you click a link on Korsakow, it can take you to many places. There’s a degree of uncertainty as to what comes next and that’s kinda the crux of the software. But, how can we do this in a way that promotes interactivity within the film and produces some kind of emotional connection?

At this point, somewhere between week 6 and 7, we’d refined our original ideas. The idea of creating an ‘aural Kuleshov effect’ – accurate definition notwithstanding – got under our skin and we wondered how we could use music, building off mine and Darcy’s previous project, to stir some kind of emotional effect in the viewer. In that project, we wondered how audio could be used as a prompt for viewers to create their own complementary video; in this project, we decided to invert it. The person receiving the work is now a viewer (though still an active viewer), no longer a consumer/prosumer/other media degree keyword. They don’t have to create something as a part of the work, they are now part of the work.

(or: Engaging With A Korsakow Project)

Talk With Your Hands Like An Ellis Island Mutt (2015)

By Steven Wingate

The best way to be informed about how to make is to consume, right? You watch films to be informed in your cinematic practice; you read to improve your writing; you struggle with a Korsakow film to figure out who/why/what/when and, most importantly, how – right?

This project took a while to really click for me, and even then I’m not sure just how much it did click. From the Korsakow homepage, I went to Showcase and click on the thumbnail that seemed the most interesting — a loosely arranged 3×4 grid of photos of a man, laid across a black background that reminded me in some weird way of the Letterboxd cover for some Stan Brakhage film we watched way back in Intro to Cinema.

Steven introduces his idea – he knows that he talks with his hands, and how people have reacted to this behaviour, but he seems interested in why, and what this says about him both as an individual as a part of a family. The title is introduced, laid out across the screen in horizontal and vertical text, as other gif-like videos of Steven pop up and bounce back and forth, with varying effects.

From here, you are given an array of options as your first choice, a non-linear way of engaging with his ideas. When you click through, you are dropped straight into one of the surely hundreds or thousands of possible, unscripted paths — fragments often pop up again at other intervals, and whether or not the fragments you are prompted with each time are different each step of the way I am not sure. It’s kinda easy to see how modularity plays into this.

The further you click through, the larger the scope becomes — what begins as a man talking to himself about his own hand gestures eventually forms into a larger narrative about immigration in the United States (no spoilers — you’ll get there). Whether or not this is an effective way of engaging with a story is TBD — when it’s not lagging to death (tried on various internet connections) and giving you the same frustration as a buffering stream, it seems cool, though requiring a lot of dedication both on part of the creator and the consumer.

Steven’s narration often complements the effects in each fragment — him saying “slow down” in a sentence may also be reflecting in the looping of a video, or his wavering identity represented through a scrolling through of colour effects. It’s these moments that break the project from seeming like one of those already ancient-looking museum installations that beg for your attention through a monotone voice reciting dates and timelines. At times, Steven’s narration seems removed from the video — “Here, I was probably talking about…” he says on different occasions — he often feels in crisis. Fragments range from gif-like videos of Steven, talking about something or showing something; to black and white images of his ancestors; to single words — all of which are expanded upon in the narration, through only in small pieces.

Actually engaging with the software is helpful in figuring out just what the heck we can do for this next project — the possibilities that come through non-linear modes such as this. How can arrange smaller parts into something so much bigger?

In Week 5, when Hannah was out, we not only ran through and reflected on each group’s assignment 2 (beneficial in guiding us beyond), we watched excerpts from Chris Marker’s 1983 film, Sans Soleil (Sunless), which helped inform us of the types of fragmentary projects that we’d be setting up for in our third assignment. Ideas around the ‘essay film’ and the ‘diary film’ gave rise to the possibility of creating something more abstract with a collection of images – of things, places, people. We got sorted in groups based on our compatibility with others in the class, based on our confidence about certain parts of the assignment process.

Marker’s mode of filmmaking is particularly interesting (I’ve currently rented a copy — disappointingly not the Criterion — of Sans Soleil from the library to finally push myself to seeing it) and his fascination with the image is really kinda inspiring. One wishes that the price/procedure of using actual film wasn’t so off-putting/expensive/intensive — that texture is to die for. Alas, the digital age is upon us, and none of the stuff that we’re doing now would even be possible if film stock was still the dominant form. We know how it is.

Korsakow got introduced — the software that we’ll be using the bring a digital life to these fragmented projects. From its homepage, it’s hard to gauge what the hell the software even is. “THE FUTURE OF STORY TELLING. You are here, because you have heared of Korsakow, a software to create interactive films for the web. But Korsakow is much more than that. Of korsakow!” It’s definitely very Russian. What it can actually do hasn’t yet been revealed, and a lot of our thinking has been based on ‘what ifs’ — what can this software actually do? How can we use it to do…. things? I have an image in my head of how it works, and how I’d like it to work, but whether or not this’ll actually be right is still TBD.

We knew at this point that we wanted to involve music somehow, and this is where we began. Constraints, ideas. “we’re going to collect video fragments in response to the question, or idea of….”; “these fragments will be made within these constraints….”