1998
video tape
duration 11 minutes
stereo, colour

concept
Above all, video is about the experience of perception, the experience of time & place. Ephèmerios is about seeing and not seeing, perceiving and not perceiving, about experiencing this gray-area in between where the two meet and seemingly dissolve into one another. The way in this video the island emerges from and disappears into the mist - or is it just going out of focus? And the way the sound track is a play of sounds and non-sounds.
Starting off from so-called "false air"; the residual sounds of a bamboo flute, the redundant sound that never was a musical sound and escaped from the bamboo as, what we call, false air, disposed of it's harmonic components it is now the source, the origin of all sounds. It is used to elicit a new sound landscape from an array of virtual instruments. Instruments varying from snares and gong-like plates to wood blocks that, while sounding, turn into a metal wind instrument.
All of these sounds are based on the harmonic spectrum of the original sound and it's development over time.

Similarly the image of the island disappearing and re-appearing is deconstructed and it's components are used to generate a new image. This way this gray area between seeing and not seeing, perceiving and not perceiving, the components that are usually considered a by-product or at best part of the timbre, are turned into the source of everything.

distribution
Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts, Amsterdam

external catalogs
Cyclops at Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts, Amsterdam