Embedded above is the video clip for Max Cooper’s Symphony in Acid
This video is from my ‘Unspoken Words’ project, where I tried to express things with music and visual art which I could not put into words. I turned to the writing of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who tackled this issue of the problems with words and their inability to capture every aspect of our lives. It approaches issues of human expression and the links between our symbolism and existence, but does so in an incomprehensibly dense way, for me at least, which was ripe for presenting as art rather than a technical reading challenge. It’s full of feeling and suggestion that we’ve played with here.
Yes, you can actually visit that website and have it play the “video clip”. Hit space to pause the track at any time, q to randomize the layout, and any of the w,e,r,t keys to alter some of the highlights. Uses a huge – manual – mapping of audio frames to visual frames and p5 under the hood.
There’s also something mesmerizing about watching the DevTools’s Elements panel and see the DOM changes get highlighted.