SHADES : TEXTS
 
 
 
 
 

It could be a pattern of chemical changes on a film, or a stream of electrons fired at a TV screen. Plato famously used the example of shadows cast by a fire on the wall of a cave.  It's hard sometimes to tell the shape from the substance that gave rise to it.  If it's all you ever see, shadow is prone to turn into "reality" - reality, to turn into shadow.

What's uncanny is how you find yourself in familiar places even when you try to detatch yourself from deciding which route to take. Making the images and making the music involve very similar processes: letting it happen, rather than making it happen. The trick is in defining the parameters. The best controllers define parameters and then let it happen. There is always some tidying up to do afterwards. Whenever I put my oar in, I live to regret it. I've never learnt to do it without splashing everywhere. I noticed afterwards how the more self-conscious the choice, the more likely it was to end up in the recycle bin. Was I any help at all?

Materials: local environment (here, countryside). Own body.

Process: digitally manipulate own shadow as cast in this environment.

End result: the green man, the shadow man, the man who left his shape behind, and so on.

EXEGESIS :

Exegesis: as in delving below the surface of a sacred text to divine its meaning. Words take on a freight they were hardly designed to carry. You can look at words so close up they cease to mean anything as words. They’re smashed up into their constituent letters. The letters loose their sounds and become shapes on the paper. Meaning is turned into suggestion. Dogma is turned into a tale of the unexpected. You could go further: to the shadows cast by the rough surface of the paper.
 

8 IKONS (A SHORT FILM - ON CD) :

Ikons are doorways – be they to God in the case of the religious kind, or to computer files in the case of the computerized variety. The “8 Ikons” leave what lies behind them or what might be discovered through them to the imagination of the viewer. The Ikons appear in a rotating sequence, out of sync with the music: ie, the musical background to each one (and hence its possibilities) changes at each presentation, creating a kind of “process-story”.