Certain Conditions
Video installation with t-shirt, bedsheets, wood, air duct vents, storage tote lid, and weather controlled digital synthesizers & video sequencer | 2022-Ongoing
Presented at:
Seasons Change, Glenaladale Schoolhouse gallery, Radiant Rural Halls, Tracadie, PE 2023 [Winter Version]
Art in the Open, Charlottetown PE 2022 [Summer Version]
Certain Conditions is a multi-media installation exploring the weather’s impact on routine. The work consists of a video collage controlled by the current weather of myself doing household chores layered over images of the sky that match the current weather. The video is projected onto a handmade screen made with cut up blue shirts and a bed sheet hung on a clothesline attached to a wooden base which functions as a bench resembling raised bed planters. The video is controlled by a program I created in MAX 8 which uses data collected from various weather stations in the region to generate both the musical score and edit of the collages. Any location can be put in and I will use the location where the work is presented. Various data points such as wind speed, temperature and precipitation all affect the final video. The decisions made around how the music and visuals would respond to the data are all based on established literary and cinematic tropes associated with weather as a storytelling device. For example, a rainy day plays music on a minor scale to indicate a sadder mood.
Each video is dubbed with a foley process where I have removed the original sounds and dubbed them over with instruments that reflect the sound’s original timbre. Forks clinking become cymbals hit by drum sticks. The chugging of a lawn mower is mimicked by distorted, tremolo picked guitar strings. Multiple videos play at a time and are designed to loop until triggered at random by the program to change. The weather controls the pace and urgency with which they are done, generating ever evolving rhythms that drift between discernable beats and cacophonous noise. The rhythms act as both anchors of stability and moments of disorganization, mimicking how easy it can be to fall in and out of routines.
The artist would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for their support of this project through a Research and Creation Grant received in 2021.