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Media: painting and scratching on 8mm film, continuous loop; black, white, color, and experimental sounds transferred to HD video on a LED monitor in a wooden box.
Dance with me (2016, 02:07 min) an experimental non-linear performative narrative video with a direct reference to the silent film era. The scenes are empty of dialogue and improvise with theatrical musical sounds. The sound is a contribution to the mood and the emotional state of the character(s) in the films. The script for each character is part of an artificial language I created to replace the spoken word. In Dance with me, I am using a quote from, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics: The Last Things and the Things Before the Last and remixed footage from Joséphine Baker's film, Zouzou are interweaved within my performance. My experimental sounds are based on the concept of artificial language associated with lexigram, the terminology used for a symbol that represents a word. I use the premise that sound and or music can symbolize a word, therefore creating an artificial language. Music is a form of communication that can represent human emotions, personal style, geographic origins, spiritual foundations, social conditions, and other aspects of humanity. To convey these different forms of human communications I developed my artificial language by constructing my own sounds from different musical instruments. I used a turn-of-the century xylophone and a grand piano and remixing tradition chords based on John Cage prepared piano practice, I alter the sound using objects between the strings, in the case of the xylophone I use random objects attached to the wooden keys. Each sound is individually decoded into a standardized set of sound symbols that formulate the sound symbols into constructed sentences based on the Latin alphabet. Each symbol represents a distinct sound. The constructed sentences are a starting point for the unspoken narrative. Using this method of sound, I follow the module of silent films by having the music in the same frame as the characters following a separate frame using text to narrate the story. |