Improvisatio

An audiovisual journey exploring the tension between composition and improvisation, digital and analogue, abstract and figurative. Made with Unity, Maya, Mudbox, Processing, and Premiere.

This experimental computer-generated video explores visually and aurally the tension between improvisation and composition, music and images, abstraction and figurativeness, and digital and analogue. The audio-visual journey combines high-resolution renders with glitch art, going from the abstract organic to the explicitly digital. Likewise, the music combines the imprecision of human performance with digital artificial sounds.

It is in the relationship between the music and the videos that the aforementioned tension is most explored. The piece displays a high level of self-referencing, with images deconstructed and reconstructed, aiming at making explicit the layer of perceptual interpretation that art always entails.

The piece aims at exploring the tension between several opposites: composition vs interpretation, digital vs analogue, abstract vs figurative. All these aesthetic axes had a direct impact on the piece and on the selected techniques. These techniques are quite heterodox, for I used a real-time engine (Unity) to render the 3D clips, these clips were processed using custom software written in Java (Processing), and the edit was finalised using a video editor (Premiere).

The composition technique aimed at including improvisation in both music and visuals, and then I iterated between music performance and video editing, allowing each to influence the other.