Gyre
A 10 part projected video meditation on the great pacific garbage patch.
Video created by processing found seed images gathered by Google. Organic & mesmerizing.
Premiered at the REDCAT Theater, October 23, 2008
but almost nobody saw it because i tacked it onto the end of a showing of Frederick Wiseman’s ”Hospital“.I just let it play after the audience had rushed out to the lounge, for well deserved drinks (“Hospital” is pretty intense) I was really happy with how it looked in that most excellent theater!
WHY WE MADE IT
Q- Your video Gyre is about the great pacific garbage patch, which is a giant accumulated landfill of garbage that wind and water currents have pushed together in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean. How did this project come about? Did you actually visit the patch?
A- I was experiencing very strong mental flashes concerning the Pacific Ocean, its not as new-age as it sounds - I'm sure if you let yourself, you'll realize this sort of thing is happening to you all the time too. Anyway I figured out I was in mourning for contact with the Ocean, with whom I have a long personal relationship - so it was natural to dedicate the products of my weird little musical experiments to that wonder & sorrow. I happened to be hitting some cool effects with this video synth I use and so a DVD was sort of coalescing. I was already using the garbage patch in the comic strip - but its voracious all-inclusive nature (self-organizing trash!) was resonating with my "trash-pirate" working method. So then I got into the gyre for a while..in my mind that is.
The closest I've been physically was when I spent a week on Kauai - just after my diagnosis. The Hawaiian islands form the extreme southern edge of the gyre...and I just kind of stared off into space. That's the last time I put on a mask & fins. That must be where it came from.
Tucker explains the impetus behind his video Gyre, which is about the great pacific garbage patch, a giant accumulated island of trash that wind and water currents have pushed together in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean: “I figured out I was in mourning for the Ocean with whom I have a long personal relationship, so it was natural to dedicate the products of my weird little musical experiments to that wonder and sorrow…I was already using the garbage patch in the comic strip, but its voracious all-inclusive nature (self-organizing trash!) was resonating with my ‘trash-pirate’ working method. So then I got into the gyre for a while...in my mind that is. The closest I've been physically was when I spent a week on Kauai, just after my diagnosis. The Hawaiian Islands form the extreme southern edge of the gyre...That's the last time I put on a mask and fins. That must be where it came from.”
encompassing the general area of 30º N to 42º N; 155 Wº to 135º W
have i seen the trash gyre yet? its not visually impressive - it’s a statistical spectacle
when you're playing for yourself and the instrument begins to have a conversation with you. i had been trying (with limited sucsess) to build a software hyper-instrument to get me back to that place.
it had to be a hyper-instrument because of my current limitations.
i had gotten far enough to have banks of precomposed scales that could be laid against eachother on the computer screen and scrubbed across freely to make strummed chords (horizontally) and scales (vertically), but repeatability was a problem. The sounds however, were so nice that I just dove in with no more thought than to work fast, and think about the pacific ocean.
when i started gyre i was still in the grip of a powerful spell where i wass constantly being bombarded by sensations of the pacific ocean - whith which I have had a deep personal relationship.
each of these musical pieces started out as an exercise in restraint... (if you can believe it!)
I had been researching and meditating on a solution to my predicament
The round trip for any given water molecule takes about a thousand years.
HOW WE MADE IT
As a sort of intermediate step in that direction you might want to consider hyper-instruments.
A groovy but misleading term, I guess the idea is that the instrument is granted responsibility for increasingly large portions of the composition, but this takes on an alarming aspect when you're actually envisioning one. Goals typically include - creation of synthetic harmony voices or chordal accompaniment, rhythmic mutation, interactive effect automation,etc… I fashioned a hyperinstrument of sorts when I created Gyre - the album is primarily "played live" by controlling Noatikl with custom scale sets in the µ-midi controller, and then feeding the results to Absynth and String Studio. The video production is another story!
the great pacific garbage gyre of the horse latitudes.
the method behind the creation of his on-going hyper-sigil artwork The Permanent Record of Newjack_Rasputin.