What I did

1). Visuals

The visuals for this piece are made up of white text on a black background, the text will be made up of the autocorrected words from the image code of The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The reason why I have chose white text on a back background is that the board that I am projecting onto will have the code written onto it so all you will see when the video is projected is word with the code from the image inside of it. This is due to the code making up the image and I still wanted to represent the fact that even though the code has been edited and deconstructed from the image that it is still the code and the words that make up the iconic image.

Originally I proposed to take photographs and make them into the visual part of this piece but I started to rethink the idea as the focus was on words and language whereas the images would focus on my own interpretation rather than what was actually shown. This is feel was a good aesthetic choice as the end product seems to work fine with just the words and reinforces the subject matter that I am covering in this work.

2). Sound

Finally, there shall be a piece of music/sound to accompany the whole piece, this will be made of notes A, B, C, D, E, F and G and ordered to as they appear in order of the text. The notes will be in the C major scale as none of the letters have flats or sharps within the text.

I begin by printing out and highlighting every letter in the scale as they appear within the images code, using logic pro I begin to enter the notes into a new project. the scale for the keyboard is six octaves long so I have a full range to work with, it is important that I set parameters for this section in order to structure the piece and make sure that is has a melody and range rather than the same section of notes. This will give the sound element a more musical nature and be not too jarring for the listeners/audience.

The sound part of the piece is a crucial element to this work as music/soundtrack is often seen as the non-verbal language in filmmaking, as Sonnenschein states ‘Music not only plays the obvious role of scoring for film soundtracks, but also is a nonverbal language that can reveal many insights.’ (Sonnenschein 2001:101) he goes on to say ‘the essence of all music is communication, whether it is personal expression, spiritual messages, political persuasion or commercial appeal.’ (Sonnenschein 2001:101) This idea of music being another form of communication, that makes reference to the Babel parable and the themes explored in this work.

The outcome of the music was reminiscent of Avant-Garde musician John Cage’s dice works, where he used the roll of a dice to compose his works. This I feel is rather fitting with what I have done by making the computer choose the music; I set the parameters but allowed the image code to compose the music.

The code has composed the visual and audio elements of this piece, even though this does not follow traditional Glitch art styles I feel that this is still a piece of Glitch art as I have created a new piece of work from editing the code of the image much in the way that a glitch artist edits the image code in order to create a new distorted version of the original.  

As this piece is the fourth piece I have made involving Glitch art techniques I have come to the conclusion that this is my area of practice, as much as I am a filmmaker I also have a passion for Glitch art and the techniques used to create new and distorted versions of works.

3). Board

Initially I decided that the code should be printed onto the 114cm by 155cm board for the film to be projected on, but I have since decided that I shall paste the code printed out on paper onto the board for the projection. I began by getting in touch with a local carpenter who gave me a piece of wooden board that was the precise measurements of the original Tower of Babel painting that was done by Pieter Bruegel, I was lucky that a person at my works partner is a carpenter so I could easily go a pick it up from him as he was working near by to where I live.

Once the wooden board was at home I could begin working on ways of getting the images code onto it, I began by printing out the image code on paper and blu tacked the pages to the board to see what would work best.   

After taking some time off from working on the piece I decided to take some inspiration from Fiona Banner’s work and hand write the code onto the board with a marker pen. I started on one side of the wood and noticed that my writing was beginning to slant, which took too much away from the code and began to look like handwritten gibberish rather than lines of code, however I noticed that the other side of the wood had clearly defined panels and was already painted white so that the code would not only stand out more but also will be more uniform and there would be clear and distinct lines of written code.

Conclusion 

This project began with a lot of promise; I was really excited about where it would go and where my work could be shown. However due to an ongoing mental health issue this project did not reach it’s full potential, this was not put together in time to be shown in an exhibition space or with the film projected onto it.

The work that I have done for this will still be an important part of my practice and I have learned what type and what areas of the Art world I want to look at in the future, but I cant help but feel that I have let myself down on this work and I have let other factors get the better of me, which is something that over time and constant work shall not affect my future projects. This while being a difficult time for me, has had a negative impact on this project, however I do not see this as any less of a piece than anything else that I have done in the past. I still managed to put something together for the unit and am happy with what I have done.