Jeremy Welsh and me spent a couple of hours today discussing ideas for the installation in Kristiansand.

The Bridge is a meta project for Jeremy’s investigations of the boarders and relations between painting and video art. Jeremy and painter Jon Arne Mogstad are going to do an installation at Christianssands Kunstforening opening on the 6th of March and has invited me to contribute sound for the installation. Jeremy’s videos are based on still images but abstracted beyond recognition.

My approach is to start of with a bit of brain storming to come up with a catalogue of possibilities. I’ve decided to develop 10 different strategies for creating synthetic sounds based on the videos Jeremy is providing me. Once I have these sketches going I’ll use them for creating instruments. Next I’ll be facing a problem I’ve been dealing with several times before: How to compose with these instruments? When I first started working on sound installations I was so concerned about dealing with sound in itself and felt that I had feed myself from more traditional problems of composition. Later on I came to realize that I still have to think of how different sounds relate to eachother in time and space but I have to develop a different set of techniques for doing so as compared to more traditional note based composition.

For the last year or so I’ve been obsessed with real time granulation based on a Max patch created by Ben Thigpen and distributed as part of Ircam-forum. I’m going to use that for this installation as well. I played some of the sketches for Jeremy today and played around with the material I’ve got so far. We also discussed how to deal with video and audio in the room but a lot of this has to be decided when we mount the installation.

The installation is to open on March 6th this year.