Tuesday 3 January 2017

Composition of Perpetual


Perpetual 2 from Peter Henderson @ Systems Art on Vimeo.

This is a revised version of a longer video that has been available on Vimeo for a year now. As well as tidying up some details, I have added a soundtrack of basoon and percussion.

The images and the audio are loosely synchronised, in that they have been matched for speed and major events by using the same mathematical sequences in their composition.

The interesting aspect of the video, in my opinion, is the way in which the layers have been combined. In fact, there are three separately constructed layers used, all being monochrome videos. One layer is used as a mask through which the other two layers are combined. That is, one layer is the ground, the other is stencilled through the (moving) mask [a travelling matte] onto the ground. The fact that all three layers are geometric creates the overall geometric effect. The reason the video is called "perpetual" is that, in principle it could have been any duration without repetition, including performances that would not repeat for years.