Output details

The Arousing of Thought

TAOT returns to a musical source by the composer responsible for the acoustic raw material used in MFMF. The issues explored emerged from Zubillaga’s interest in conjunctions and disjunctions of sound and image, and led to his research question – namely the limits of their interrelationship in promoting and prolonging semantic multiplicity.

Zubillaga began by exploring the possibilities of a generative encounter between the music and visuality. Inspired by precursors in synaesthetic experimentation (e.g. Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition), the researcher developed drawings suggesting the operations of transposition and transformation between musical and visual forms/modes of perception/ representation.

The result was a 6-minute animation comprising the material derived from the digitally scanned semi abstract drawings, combined with acoustic material, amounting to several hundred layers of visual components and sounds. Zubillaga’s interest in exploring non-narrative, affective and visceral expression within the audio-visual domain underwritten by a musical continuum was emphasised by the occlusion of any identifiable locus of people, place, or period. For the screening at BIM, Zubillaga scanned and edited 16mm film remains and radio debates produced by the Grupos de Improvisación de La Plata, plus film segments from a rare Elda Cerrato 1971 animation.

TAOT adds to a sustained preoccupation in Zubillaga’s work with the space between realism and abstraction. Using contemporary classical music and a form of cinematic ‘writing’ that eschews determinate semantic content (as here in the title and credits), abstract and figurative elements operate contrapuntally. TAOT constitutes an experiment in the possibilities of data management strategies to enable the sequencing of the imagery to respond to the music and thus to further the research question behind this work.

Premiere: Ann Arbor Film Festival (500 viewers).

IMT Gallery : Solo screening, 2012.

Bienal de la Imágen en Movimiento (BIM) in Buenos Aires: (150 viewers)

Issues explored in The Arousing of Thought emerged from Zubillaga’s interest in conjunctions and disjunctions of sound and image, and led to his research question: the limits of their interrelationship in promoting and prolonging semantic multiplicity.

Zubillaga began by exploring the possibilities of a generative encounter between the music and visuality Inspired by precursors in synaesthetic experimentation, with researcher-developed drawings suggesting the operations of transposition and transformation between musical and visual forms/modes of perception/ representation. The result was a 6-minute animation comprising the material derived from the digitally scanned semi abstract drawings, combined with acoustic material, amounting to several hundred layers of visual components and sounds.