La Folia image sequence 1 Facebook

In 2008, I had the privilege to start a collaboration with Paola Erdas, “my goddess of the harpsichord” (http://www.paolaerdas.it/). That first movie was done to Arcangelo Corelli's "Variations on La Follia” (https://vimeo.com/9578954) magnificently transcribed and interpreted by Quadro Janas (Paola Erdas, harpsichord; Lorenzo Cavasanti and Dorothee Oberlinger, recorders; Jorge Alberto Guerrero, cello).
That experience shaped what I have done since, it’s fair to say that I never recovered from it (and am immensely grateful for that).
With Paola, we’ve done many more movies since (https://vimeo.com/album/2985377) and it is far from being over…
We are going to present a live images - music concert this coming December (in Trieste, where Paola lives and teaches), not only our very first live concert together, but our first meeting in person to boot!
In preparation for that momentous (for me) event, I am furiously working on the developing of processes that will enable me to generate and mix -in real time- images and videos so as to have my part in the live images-music concert be as spontaneous as Paola’s music.
I am enjoying the experience thoroughly, this is the closest I have ever been, working with computers, to how it felt many years ago when I was still allowed (allergies to paint fumes and more) to get immersed in the mysterious space of large canvases while painting with both hands.
Computers and their various applications have always seemed to me to be made for the anal retentive, working one stroke at a time or one frame at a time (as if playing the piano with one finger only, or building a wall one brick at a time) and, when attempting to work in a more “global” way, via (for example) algorithms, to be trapped in a fake visual world which is indeed very very very shallow and pale when compared to the elusive and “juicy” world of natural media (what I have labeled “Visual Karaoke”: http://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=680).
Part of the various approaches I am working on involves using Facebook as a creative tool: I extract many mages from “finished” movies and post them to Facebook in albums that sometimes hold as many as 1,000 images. I then use the “likes” collected by these images and create image sequences respecting those “likes” numbers (the first image of this movie, itself an image sequence created as explained, visually presents the logic behind this: https://vimeo.com/284607530)
So, the sketch presented here is an image sequence made from an album of images posted on Facebook, images that were extracted from the original “La Folia” movie, the very first one done in collaboration with Paola and her Quadro Janas.
In my preparations for our live images - music concert, I decided to work with an excerpt from another gorgeous music recorded by Paola, with her Janas Trio this time (Paola Erdas, harpsichord; Lorenzo Cavasanti, recorder; Jorge Alberto Guerrero, cello): “Variations sur les Folies d’Espagne” composed by Marin Marais.
This is what came out of my practising and developing real-time processes: https://vimeo.com/285625363
I thought I was done with that, but the music and, especially, this amazing interpretation by the Janas Trio, would not let go of me.
So I went back to work and did the full piece, visible here: https://vimeo.com/286690841

In both cases, I employed the image sequence presented here, it felt just right to connect the first Follia done with Paola with this latest one(s).

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