Output details

Bangs, thumps, taps and rattles

This multi-screen video was created in response to an invitation by Matt’s Gallery to create a work in memory of the percussionist Paul Burwell. Building on Hooker’s research into the idea of performance-without-performer (‘Dust and a Shadow’, 1990; ‘Ever Since’, 1991; ‘Audio Accompaniment’, Output 1), this commemorative work explores complex and contrasting percussive rhythms and visual images. For this video installation Hooker conducted research into ways in which historical data on the web can be used to generate new audio-visual work, and how techniques of sound collage can be developed to generate new work from found footage. This film, in particular, uses multi-layers of sampled sound and video to generate complex percussion rhythms and images that fill the gallery wall. The installation uses split-screen and stereo to create an immersive experience, enveloping the viewer both audibly and visually.

Through a process of selection, re-appropriation, layering, editing and looping using Final Cut Pro, Hooker creates an audio-visual experience that comments on contemporary digital culture, the old and the new, and ideas of cultural stereotyping and globalisation. Advancing processes of layering typical of ‘mash-ups’, Hooker fuses two ‘analogue’ performances readily available on the web to create a digital performance that would be virtually impossible to perform ‘live’: a performance that can only exist digitally.

The two web film clips bring together the work of Buddy Rich (in a clip that portrays him as an older generation ‘glitzy’ entertainer) with that of an unknown younger performer and culturally opposite ‘street drummer’. Beginning independently of one another, the two remarkably different clips are gradually merged, complicating the rhythms and visual imagery. This represents the first in a series of works that Hooker is currently developing that use projected split-screen images of up to 64 drummers with a surround-sound system.

SEE DIGITAL OUTPUT.