Dead Alive – Museum Installation Concept
For an as-of-now proposed museum installation, I created an audiovisual project called "Dead Alive," combining spatial audio techniques, found footage, and coded visual architecture to invoke the life and death of a fly in speaking to the transcendence of life as a whole. The audio includes one vocoded lyric, "I am alive!" encapsulated around a claustrophobic technological landscape. This musical arrangement of electronic synthesis attempts to recall an irony in augmenting life artificially – as to invoke the bliss achieved when dystopia is normalized into bliss. If we can take this bliss – a kind of pleasure – in life – with us in consciousness, can life really be all that bad?
Visually, the piece represents a very digitized reality, combining found footage of maggots and flies to show "growth" – both the burgeoning of a fly community and the transcendence of a fly into higher life form upon achieving consciousness. I am not trying to celebrate the life of a maggot, exactly, but rather trying to ask if life has any special meaning apart from a subjective individual experience. How important is having a community to grow? The use of abstract shapes and colors attempt to recall "universal" concepts between lifeforms through a shared material world, and they take on more surrealist elements to make transcendence a more "universal" phenomenon. Is it one that can be shared outside the need for community in life, or is it tailored to the individual? The shapes the triangular prism takes – as well as the content of the projections mapped onto its planes – may indicate a sense of feeling trapped or finding greater purpose. Visual perspective is key to this piece.
The audio was written and mixed in surround sound using Logic Pro, while the visuals were mapped onto the prism using Java-based language Processing. Audible is a stereo rendering of the full surround mix. Any found footage used is part of the public domain, discovered using a specialized search on archive.org. Other footage was by-and-large generated in the Processing software, or otherwise processed through After Effects. The video timeline was finalized in Final Cut. The audio is composed of all originally synthesized material created in a DAW, with the exception of a single chant sampled from a common drum machine.