Islands Of Consciousness is the latest addition to my portfolio of experiments, sketches and artistic works Incubator. It emerged from a collaboration with the Ukrainian musician and composer Oleg Marakov alias Corpuscul. When he showed me Islands his musical piece for 4 simultaneous MP3 players in shuffle mode I immediately saw the great potential to combine it with my Flickeur project.
Islands Of Consciousness is an infinite movie with a randomly arranged soundtrack created in realtime with random images from Flickr. It is different to Flickeur in many aspects: I have extended the visual grammar and completely changed the algorithm which chooses the images from Flickr - now it is truly an associative stream, as each image is chosen based on the previous one's tags.
The most important feature though is the soundtrack: not only is it randomly arranged using ca. 40 MB of sound samples, what's more important is that it directly influences and controls the flow of the movie and the graphical effects that are applied to the images.
Due to those differences the narrative that evolves out of this arrangement is not so often the "this is the janitor that was the last person who saw the two girls before they met the evil clown in the woods" type of story that Flickeur very often creates, but rather a real stream of consciousness with many surprising or disturbing elements: Especially when a sound seems to fit perfectly to the content of an image or when the composition of layered and masked images looks just beautiful or strong. I recommend a minimum viewing time of 5 minutes in order to see the variety of the piece and don't worry if the screen stays black in the first minute - it is not broken but caused by the random creation process.
Note: due to the law of probability the chances that you will encounter cats, dogs, marriages or babies in almost every movie are pretty good. Maybe a little bit too many cats for my taste.
Posted at March 09, 2006 01:37 PM | Further reading
