Output details

fuzee

/fuzee/ is an eight-minute audiovisual work and part of a series of pieces exploring the relationship between sonic form, through time, and visual form, through space. In /fuzee/, this is manifested as a very close relationship between the sound sources used in the sonic montage and the corresponding motion in the visual system.

The sonic montage is composed entirely from recordings of clocks of various different shapes and sizes, ticking or chiming. It is made up of 30 separate tracks, each of which controls a different component of the visual system.

The visual system is made up of 180 objects that appear to be lines, with six lines controlled by each audio track. However, these apparent lines are in fact composed of 200 very small rectangles laid end-to-end and slightly over-lapping. Each group of 6 lines is controlled via an envelope tracker, monitoring the amplitude of the relevant audio track. As amplitude increases, the angle of rotation of each subsequent rectangle in the line increases, causing the lines to appear to curl up. This curling up, and the fanning out of the corners of rectangles once the rotation passes a certain level, creates circle and cog-like shapes that reference the inner workings of clocks and other time pieces.

The relationship between sonic shapes in the source material and corresponding visual motion is such that dynamic forms are equally evident across both media, creating a sense of audiovisual cohesion. As we would see the mechanism of a clock move and hear the expected ticking, so this work reflects and expands on this type of causal relationship, with both subtlety and ambiguity.

As with the majority of my audiovisual work, /fuzee/ is realized entirely through open source software, using a bespoke visual system realized in Processing (processing.org).