Posts

Showing posts from April, 2023

LAYER 11: SLEEP

Image
  an experiment with sound and image We arrived at another village, close to the size of my own, perhaps a bit larger. At least the emptiness of the streets inflated the hollowness of the place, and the gray sunshine sucked the color out of everything. Interrupting the emptiness every fifty feet or so was a sleeping person, lying on their back, in the middle of the road, lying perfectly straight, in the gray sunlight. Their mouths were all slightly agape, lips and tongue blurred from vibrations. "You can't hear them, but they're communicating right now. They're singing to each other in their slumber, forming a network across the village," she said while looking straight onward, paying no heed to the sleeping persons she was referring to. "Soon this network will be integrated with the Waiyado."  I cull the urge to ask what the Waiyado is, given my apprehension toward opening my mouth, lest the vile tongue should awaken from my belly again. Luckily she exp

LAYER 10: DESTRUCTION

Image
I awake to a chorus of wailings on the rising sun. Aimless wanderers crowd the market road, but ash is the only aroma filling the air. Someone approaches me, face obscured by the day's harsh brilliance. As I turn my head to regard them, a tugging tightens in my mouth, and I am reminded of the long tongue coming from my throat, which has become by now twice as rotten and warty. As I pull back, patches of browned flesh pull apart in filmy layers. I fall backward. The tongue has snapped apart. Bracing myself to feel the ground on my neck, I feel on my shoulders a pair of frail arms sustain me from my fall. What remains hanging of the tongue recedes down into my throat, and only then does the shadow of its intolerable taste attack my memory (it was the sweetness of something rotten, nature corrupted). "Your mother and father have thrown themselves into the ocean. Your sisters and brothers are dead, you were presumed dead too" Old Man Hands's arm descends shakily from my s

LAYER 09: IMAGES

Image
  interforest equinox made in Pure data using GEM extension, there is music too but I forgot to record the sound for this one. routed all changing parameters to volume of a mono synth. trees are generated using an L-system (taken and modified from an example patch). ways to move forward: generate more variables for the L-system to have more complex branching patterns, craft a more extensive lofi 3d environment with simple shapes, create and import .obj files, hook up separate parameters to different musical parameters (frequency, amplitude gates, specific midi input) "The denoted image naturalizes the symbolic message, it innocents the semantic artifice of connotation, which is extremely dense, especially in advertising."  -Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image" in Image, Music, Text , 45  Without time to catch my breath I hurried my step to keep up with her, so that my tongue, wrapped around her hand, would not violently push my head forward at each step of hers,

LAYER 08: AGAIN

It was her that I heard before dawn this morning, in that awful forest, on my way to the well, that horrible sound again, that I thought before must have come from heaven, now coming from the staff she held at her mouth, a strange flute that seemed to breathe, although that's not so strange considering that everything here breathes. It is only when you think about it too much that it begins to seem strange, the way the path below your feet expands and contracts, how the tables and chairs and cots vibrate and look to be covered in a thin slime, disappearing at the touch. And now, the sun disappeared again behind dusk I behold her, beneath her giant hat her face half-shadowed, though in the shadow her giant eyes gaze through me, unassuming, though as if I happened to catch a cold brash wind spewing from her my arms fling themselves around my body unprompted even as I slowly approach. Her profuse and ruffled garb I gather is like that of a prophet. But she couldn't be one. She'