This month we caught up with former RAMP student, Dario Dornel, who told us about his exciting visual art collaboration, that translates paintings into sound. The art goes on show at the Haze Gallery from the 3rd, and will be released on Bandcamp on the 15th December. Here's Darios breakdown of the project -
The Sound Design of DESMEDIR
"he asked me how his paintings would sound"
Hanging out with a painter friend and talking about the similarities in the creative processes of painting and music, he asked me how his paintings would sound. This question led us to a collaborative project and exhibition called DESMEDIR, in which I used some pretty cool tools I learned from the RAMP course "Modular Synthesis & Sound Design Tools" with Adam Winchester.
In June 2021, I started the course with the expectation of going deeply into Modular Synthesis and learning how every single module or nob could shape a sound. I learned a lot about that, but I also discovered new techniques and approaches to designing sound that I didn't know existed. One tool that particularly interested me consists of transforming images into sounds. And then, another one that allows you to manipulate the audio signal using graphics, which means you can visually shape the sound.
The creative process
When my painter friend MASCOGA showed me his last work of a series of 10 paintings and told me that he wondered how the paintings would sound, surprisingly, I didn't think about the tools I had learned in the course some months ago. The first thing that came to my mind was, let's say, a traditional approach to how I could produce that sound.
I started to think about which feelings the paintings generate in me and how to represent them in a sound piece. Honestly, I don't do this process too often when I face abstract artwork, and I wouldn't say I like it too much. It feels a bit boring going through this highly conscious and mental process when exploring feelings. I guess that, as a sound artist, what inspires me the most is the sound itself. And playing around with it, without any preconceptions or mental restrictions, is a kind of meditation. But for some reason, that didn't come to my mind.
Consequently, I was stuck, creatively blocked.
But the answer to this struggle was exactly inside my friend's question: "How would the paintings sound?"
Then I remembered what I had learned some months ago and that, for some reason, I hadn't connected it yet. And that was liberating. I got very excited immediately, full of thoughts. The idea of using a machine in the creative process, not only as a music instrument or technology but also for making actual decisions of how to translate the image information into sound, ethics apart, fascinated me. It gave me something to start with.
To start, I received from MASCOGA a photograph of each painting, and then I imported the raw data into the software Audacity, which translated the Bitmap's code into sound.
Suddenly, I was listening to a rough, mechanical sound, emerging directly from the picture, but with certain storytelling related to the painting.
From there on, I was free to make aesthetic, technical, and artistic decisions. And here is where the fun started.
First, I made different cuts of the original sound to use additional layers of it. With them, I could create different textures, place the sounds in other space planes, change their pitch to fill a broader range of frequencies, etc., always using the original sound coming from the pictures.
To have an idea of what DESMEDIR looks like and sounds like, I share here the picture of the painting "Volar" (Fly) with its respective sound piece.
Artwork: Volar / Fly. MASCOGA, 2021.
Sound Piece: Volar. KIRAP, 2021.
https://kirap.bandcamp.com/track/volar
In the end, this project has produced a series of ten paintings, a music album with the respective ten sound pieces, and a Solo Exhibition in Haze Gallery in Berlin. And more things are coming.
The music album DESMEDIR will be released on my Bandcamp page on December 15th. Some tracks are already available there. (kirap.bandcamp.com/album/desmedir)
The Exhibition DESMEDIR will be held in Haze Gallery, from December 3rd to December 25th. I invite everybody interested to come to the Opening on December 3rd at 19:00 hrs. Address: Bülowstraße 11, 10783 Berlin.
About DESMEDIR
DESMEDIR: Flying lightly and misaligning the false border in movement and distance, of a glacial winter and transhumant sound.
DESMEDIR is an abstract work of acrylic painting on canvas and its soundscapes; it’s a piece of art which combines two disciplines: painting and sound design.
The word DESMEDIR to refer to that action (initially conceived) opposed to what was measured, does not exist according to the dictionary of the Real Academia Española (RAE). DESMEDIR is created to compose the work with the sense of going backwards, not only to that which was measured but also to the questioning of what we know today as such.
The work is constructed from a neutral place where it questions the existence of at least three places: the measured, the immeasurable and the neutral. What is nothingness? What is the definition of the human changing? What would life be like without us? There is a convention that such a place is associated with the natural; with that which had no (apparent) intervention or modification, with purity, fragility and naivety; with all that we know and know of its existence given the ability to reason and assimilate the word table as the object that allows us to rest things on it. The neutral starting point of creation. Creation that each spectator will be able to experience.
Related links
MASCOGA
website: mascoga.com/
Instagram: instagram.com/mas.coga/
KIRAP
Bandcamp: kirap.bandcamp.com/
Instagram: instagram.com/jkirap/
HAZE GALLERY:
Instagram: instagram.com/haze.gallery/
Facebook: facebook.com/hazegallery/
Comments
Post a Comment