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The aim and wanted result of this project was to find adequate images to the already finished song RM by Ottawa’s if then do (Nathan Medema, Ross Birdwise and now Simon Guibord).
The images where to act in full service of the song, as comment, mirror and counterpoint to its internal narrative. The odd yet majestic ritual of the Starlings ended up finding its way into the project and in the finished video, the number of starlings (4 million) grow to create a visual (digital) carpet that almost tricks the eye into thinking its watching dancing pixels. This organic illusion of artifice was a perfect accessory and nod to the “computer language” used in the music.
Decomposing the image itself became part of the texture by subjecting the pristine footage into looping duplicates. By making a dub on a VHS tape, a generation of quality was lost. By dubbing the duplicate footage on itself (12 times over) the result is a full loss of recognizable elements. The tape gets confused, fuzzed up and dives into a quasi-Brackage world of (analog) abstractions … where the reduction, accidents and wear of the tape becomes an imposed synthetic over the organic creatures.
Unexpected mistakes and loss of control beautifully get lost in “ugly” broken television textures that frantically jump around the screen. The overall story of the piece is utterly dependent on the image loosing its beauty in these chaotic moments only to (at its climax) bloom into a burst of melodic elation where only untouched footage is used.
Like the music, the climactic visual patterns of the birds carry both the glitchy surface sparkles while allowing its center to slowly curve into massive shifts and movements that seemingly morph from one spontaneous moebius strip to another.
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Image editing: Martin Dupuis
Images: Jeffery Hazell
Music: if then do
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