The Visible Resonance of Bookends

A few years ago, composer Mikel Kuehn (http://mikelkuehn.com/) and I decided to collaborate.
Our first piece was "...lilac shrieks and scarlet bellowings..." (http://vimeo.com/18551194) for which I created the images first, using a temporary sound track (http://vimeo.com/46068202), which was removed when giving Mikel the silent video for/from which he was to compose the music.

We both enjoyed the experience and wanted to do another project but this time, by reversing the process.
Mikel gave me a selection of several of his compositions, and we settled for "The Secret World of Bookends" (http://mikelkuehn.com/index.php/works/125-the-secret-world-of-bookends-electroacoustic-2005).

Here's Mikel's description of that piece: "The Secret World of Bookends (2005) is an electroacoustic fantasy based entirely on recorded sounds made by two generic metal bookends. I found the inexpensive bookends in the basement of my new house and was intrigued by the sound that they made when I accidentally dropped one. The resulting piece not only explores their sonic attributes but also the boundless imaginary world that exists in the myriad of thoughts and information between a functioning set of bookends. The sounds that the bookends make are gradually exposed and transformed over the course of the work. Most of the sounds in the piece were produced by striking, bowing, or grating the metal bookends."

I created the images by trying to find as simple a starting point as Mikel had when composing the music, what he explored in/with what he had just discovered "by accident."
My own "simple" start was the first video shot with a new iPhone 4S, capturing a short walk from my place to the corner-store (lasting 31 seconds), and then squeezing out of those 31 seconds all that I could, in resonance with Mikel's music.

As usual, the web version of this piece pales in comparison to the uncompressed original, this is increasingly becoming a real problem for the kind of images my work is uncovering, but just as I have always refused to surrender to the "digital look" of images almost imposed by the applications I (have to) use, I am not about to alter the images that offer themselves to me for the sake of this delivery method.