Working with image signal instead of sound remains to many an undiscovered country. One artist is producing beautiful meditations on analog video – and charting his work.
Christopher Konopka treats the Eurorack modular as a canvas, carefully producing slow-moving, richly organic work. He calls them “emotional abstractions” – and relates the experience of navigating new textures to that of our perception of time and memory.
You can watch this, along with musings on what he’s doing and how the patches work, in an exhaustive YouTube channel. It’s some mesmerizing inspiration:
Oh yeah – so how do you remember work, when it exists as ephemeral combinations of knobs and patch cables? Christopher has added one obsessive layer of digital organization, a data project he calls “broadcast-research.” Using scripts and code he shares on his GitHub, he automates the process of recording and organizing texture output, all in open source tools.
So there’s a meeting of digital and analog – and Christopher even suggests this data set could be used with machine learning.
(Hot tip – even if you’re happy to let your own creations disappear “like tears in the rain” and all that jazz, you might poke around hit GitHub repository and fork it as you’ll find some handy recipes and models for working with these tools for other projects. It’s done in Go + Bash command line scripts + free graphics tools FFprobe, FFmpeg, and ImageMagick, which are great alternatives to getting sucked into Photoshop glacially loading and then crashing. Ahem.)
The hardware in question:
Lots more – including an artist statement – on his site:
https://github.com/cskonopka/broadcast-research
ImageMagick is genius, by the way – time to do another recipe round-up, a la (see also comments here):
Previously, related: