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In 2016, I began the practice in my studio of making these video and sound studies, as experiments in creating short works to find the meeting places between playing the saw (manipulated with software) and making real-time manipulated video.
I made several of these studies, took a long break, then picked the practice back up in 2021 after I had been working with a new video synthesizer for a while. I made a larger number of them, and then realized that I wanted to see them together in a grid-like structure (something akin to a video wall), particularly as many of them are made with detailed grid structures and patterns. With the sound, I also realized that my saw playing had evolved in such a way that layering some of these videos together could work in interesting ways.
I arrived at the creation of this video study grid, which gives the user the ability to play any number of the videos simultaneously, and control the audio level on each video; in this way, the visual patterns of the accumulated videos can be mixed in any number of ways, and simultaneously the sonic saw-field of the played videos can be thoroughly mixed as well.
As i'm thinking about how the SSVSG has evolved and now exists, i like how it has the potential to be ever-expanding without any basic limits (outside of the structure imposed on it). No real endpoint, end credits, or ending. And for that matter, no real beginning either... it has its origin, but that's really more for my own historical reference. I can keep it going as long as my practice allows. So does this mean it won't change in any meaningful ways, beyond this continuance? I think it can, and it has in the past... one basic thing have been changes (big and small, obvious and subtle) in the tech i've been using, and surely that will shift again at some point. Also, as a basic series of works, this can appear in the world in other ways beyond the grid. I've exhibited single videos in different venues, and i'm excited to be showing a selection from the series in a gallery exhibition this summer.
Version 2 of the grid (updated in December 2024) encompasses the videos made from 2021-2024. Now with two brand new videos, the grid represents an approach that started in 2021, roughly two years after i began working with the LZX Industries Vidiot (a small video synthesizer with ever-expansive possibilities), and with which i'm continuing with this and other work down many different pathways.
I started making these video studies in 2016, just as i was beginning work with my first portable video synth (the BPMC Fluxus beta... see the link below for my first study). I had first encountered and been able to work with real-time video synthesis during a residency at the Experimental Television Center in 2008 (a legendary historical studio for video art established by Ralph and Sherry Hocking in the early 1970s), and it was 7 years after that i started working with this directly in my studio. Then in 2017 I went on a residency at Signal Culture (in many ways the successor of the ETC), and subsequently was able to get my hands on a Vidiot synth (made by LZX Industries) which greatly expanded my palette and process with real-time video manipulation.
A grid to play in, on and through -- an occasionally updated set of studies in visual and sonic play (with a singing saw and video synthesizer), arranged in a grid to be played in any number of combinations. When new studies are added, the grid arrangement will be re-oriented and a new edition released.