Chris Brown - Becoming Boards

Chris Brown | DIGITAL MEDIA DESIGNER Becoming Christian marclay

THE BRIEF

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Our brief was to look into a designer and their prac-tise and then using our research to create an outcome, inspired by, in one way or another, the designers work/practise etc.

Our designer was Christian Marclay, an audio designer and the founder of turntablisim. He creates audio and visual mashups and physically alters his favourite for-mat, vinyls, to create a strange arrangement.

So to begin with we started to look into his practise and some of the work he has done and how he goes about doing it.

One of his works that I like the most is his audiovisual mashup ‘Telephones’. In this clip Marclay uses different telephone conversation clips from various movies and makes a strange almost conversation between the differ-ent characters.

I like the way that Marclay makes use of already existing films and remixes their content to be used in unorthodox ways. I like these methods and I think the results are very interesting/diverse as all of the film sequences that he creates are in different contexts with different characters or locations – some are even in black and white.

It was even this early in the project that it thought I that you could apply this remix method to other practices for some interesting results and that I wanted to look into this some more.


Group RESEARCH

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In groups we continued to research into Christian Marclay and together we shared our research to gain a much knowledge as possible on him.

I also found out about his piece of work called ‘The Clock’ which similar to his piece ‘Telephones’ makes use of already existing media and cuts it together to make something new and interesting.

For this Marclay created a 24hr installation that makes use of film/tv sequences that show the time. He created a 24hr long sequence that could be dropped into at any point and it would represent the current time of day.

We also looked into the other side of Christian Marclay, the soundscape/mashup creating side. He makes custom turntables and slices vinyls together to create rhythms and different sounds. He also makes use of the sounds that are not supposed to be there such as vinyl pops and scratching the vinyls on the turntable.

Using these methods he has created many soundscapes and performs live using multiple turntables with custom vinyls. His work is extremely abstract and I am not particularly a fan of it. However, I was starting to really be interested in his workflow of taking already existing media and then mashing it up/breaking it to create something new or making use of things that are unwanted within the media or unintentionally there.

We then had to take our research and create a presentation to show to our peers and to introduce and explain our chosen designer, their work and their practise.

To do this we took all of our research and made it into a list of bullet points.

We then split this up equally and each focused on a certain area of his practise - which we then in turn made into a video that we would ‘mash-up’ into a presentation, employing his methods within our work to subliminally have the feel of Marclays work.

This was interesting as we played the results back to back and everyone had approached presenting the information in a different way, I got existing movies and music videos that I had on my hard drive and extracted the words of what I wanted to say and cut them back to back, like Marclay did in ‘Telephones’.

What is his style of work?

“The inventor of Turntablism – which is the art of manipulating sounds and creating music using phonograph turntables or digital turntables and a DJ mixer. He creates sound collages using gramophone records and turntables. Manipulating or damaging records to produce continuous loops or skips in patterns. Works with inexpensive records not spending more than a $1. Cuts and rejoins different LP records. Employs Plunderphonics. Free improvisation.”

The section of what we wrote about Christian Marclay that I referenced from for my section of the presentation.


personal research

03

After we had made this presentation we then had to take whatever research we had and then start to explore where we could take it on our own, to produce an effective outcome.

Firstly I further broke down what his work is and the different processes and mediums he uses and then decide where I could take this project. I looked into all of the following aspects of his practise and their offshoots and related topics. I mainly looked into:

MASHUPS

REMIXES

REUSING/SAMPLING

WARPING/MANIPULATING/BREAKING

RECORDING ONTO DIFFERENT MEDIA

PHYSICALLY (and DIGITALLY) BREAKING THE MEDIA

STITCHING MEDIA TOGETHER

WARPING/MANIPULATING/BREAKING

Marclay uses mainly analogue processes, however I wanted to explore weather these techniques could also be applied or used digitally as this is more appropriate for my style of working and this day and age. Marclay couldn’t physically remix anything digital (as it is virtual) and was limited by technological advancements and their complexity. However, I am slightly more experienced within this field so I wanted to experiment with applying his same workflow and processes to the way I work and I think that these outcomes are what drove my project forward.

REMIXESI looked into Remixes as this is mainly what Marclays work is categorized as and he is seen as a ‘Remixer’.

I like how by remixing content you can give it a whole new life and completely change how it is perceived by the viewer/listener.

By using his analogue processes, Marclay can physi-cally remix vinyls by cutting and pasting them together to make different forms. He has also created custom instruments out of turntable parts so he can alter the speed and pitch etc of recordings on the fly so he can also make performances of his work.

Mash-up

Sampling

When looking at the definition of a mashup it is defined in several different contexts, but they all have the same underlying theme that it is 2 or more different kinds of the same thing mixed together to make something different.

Video mashups are a bit less common than audio mashups, as decent results are harder to achieve but people quite often mix different movies together to make different effects. People also can often re-contextualise videos or music genres by using this mashup effect.

I then looked into sampling as this plays a big part in Marclays work and this is essentially what he is doing when he stitches several vinyls together.

Sampling is a technique that is mainly within audio recordings but can also be applied to video or other forms. It is when you take a ‘sample’ of a small section of an already existing work and incorporate it into your work or make work inspired by it.

Marclay sometimes creates new compositions out of noises or ambient audio recordings and then samples other musicians work and sometimes distorts them by changing the speed/pitch etc like his composition featuring a slowed down Jimi Hendrix solo scratched on a vinyl with the composition running behind. I could use sampling in my work by mixing different audio and visual elements, especially if I am trying to change/manipulate files digitally I may need to sample some sections of the results that I get to make a whole composition.

manipulating/breakingMarclays practise revolves around manipulating existing works so I looked into manipulating in the context of music and video. After researching into this for a while found that Marclays work is extremely unique and I couldn’t find anyone else that produces work like his, especially using his methods, which is a very exciting prospect if I am going to take this into a digital realm.

Some artists, specifically musical, use software to ma-nipulate or distort sound to make an effect or some do this in analogue ways by physically breaking or altering things.

I found looking into composers like George Crumb and John Cage very interesting as they publicly started the whole debate of what is music/art and pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable and made a pathway for people like Marclay to experiment and for people to accept his work.


experimentation

04

I then tried putting my ideas/research into practise and actually trying to apply Marclays method of working to my practise.

I wanted to experiment with a wide range of materials – but I was a bit limited by what I could get my hands on and by financial constraints. However there was still a large range that I could try. I wanted to mainly use digital media but I am going to explore the few analogue formats available to me as the results from this kind of experimental work differ greatly and I wanted to get a wide range of results.

As I wanted to create a mix of audio and visuals I needed to look into both so I looked into the following analogue processes:

-CDs and how they are effected when they are scratched.

I then moved onto looking at digital formats and how they could be manipulated:

-Image Files (JPEG,BMP etc)-Video Files-Video Codecs-Compression on these-DVD’s-Internet Streams

I found that the CD scratching excercise was helpful and gave some interesting results with CD’s skipping and slowing down etc which make really nice sounds. So I captured some of these onto my computer for use later.

I then moved onto trying to firstly corrupt images. This is when I started to really see some interesting results and by experimenting realising the possibilities of what I was trying to do.

I got an image of a cat and distorted it in many ways. I started by getting images as different formats and then erasing some of their data - essentially corrupting them,

by using a program like notepad or text edit to delete chunks of the code that make up the image and then opening them again in Photoshop and other image editors/viewers and seeing what they could make of the file if at all.

This was quite a frustrating process as there is a lot of trial and error involved and quite often you render the file unreadable and have to start again.

I started to make not of the best settings and started to compile a list of all of the different way to corrupt the files and the sort of outcomes they produced and how it effected the images.


EXPERIMENTATION

05

I then wanted to try and apply this effect to video. There were several ways that I could approach doing this, and I tried the few that I could think of and I’m sure there are lots of ways that I didn’t think of, but I got some decent results using the methods that I found and due to time constraints I did not experiment any further than I could as I began to ran out of time, and videos

seemed to be a lot more easy to corrupt to it took me a long while to actually find ways of corrupting the files successfully. I did find the ways that I had found created some amazing visual effects/patterns - which then differed depending on what media player you used and what settings that was using. This would often crash my computer too making for many, many restarts, which

slowed down the process dramatically.

To actually then capture these effects I had to do a screen recording of my screen and crop that as if you export the videos it would not have the same effect, it is the playback codec that makes the video look strange.

I created this effect by re-encoding videos repeatedly with lower bitrates and then scaling them and repeating whilst exporting them with a sharpen filter.

This effect was made by opening the video file in an audio editor and then applying an effect, such as reverb to the video and then exporting it as a video, or raw data which was then converted into a video.

This effect was created by saving the video out as raw data and then importing and resaving out of an audio editor with different compression such as A-Law and U-Law, which I found to be the most effective.


OUTCOME

06

Once I had tested these effects enough I then applied them to the same music video clip and then cut them all together and mixed them with the audio that I had cap-tured from the scratched CD’s and from the corrupted video files (most often the music was extremely slowed down).

I think the outcome is quite successful and it very ab-stract and I think the combination of the visuals and the way I managed to cut together the audio works really well. I made some obvious cuts between the normal footage and the corrupted footage which makes for a nice effect.


EVALUATION

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I think the outcome of my project was very successful and is definitely a piece of work that is the quality that I would like to put in my portfolio. I think that the outcome definitely answers the brief as it uses several of Marclays methods of working and views on work.

You can clearly see where I started and how my research and thorough experimentation has influenced my final piece.

I would like to come back to this piece of work at a later date and edit it slightly better when I had more time and to be able to find more ways of corrupting videos to create effects, as it got extremely tedious using the trial and error process to find ways of doing it and recording the ways I had tried and the ways that were successful.

I think that especially after about 2mins 30s the video gets a tad samey, and although I had several different video effects that I had managed to create they do start repeating themselves and it would be nice to have some more effects, or enough to fill up the video without it getting repetitive. I didn’t particularly want to cut the composition short as I had arranged the sound in a way that sounded good but faded out at about 3mins.

I would also like to experiment some more with different formats or kind of media like the internet for example using streaming technology. Also if I could use some more analogue formats and combine this with digital it would make for an interesting outcome but I didn’t have to opportunity to experiment with much analogue processes due to financial constraints.

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Chris Brown - Becoming Boards