Trees & Keys

Michael Denton (Overlap, UK)

ABSTRACT:

Recent Overlap works explore the relationship between still and moving imagery through use of discreet picture planes, obscuration techniques and implied motion within transitions. The view is in movie time but limited to flat photographic space, seen through a perceptual keyhole more akin to memories and dreams.

To create Trees & Keys Overlap took short sequences of photos in East Sussex, Bordeaux, San Diego and Riverside Counties, California: one frame every ten paces, or one every 30 degrees in a 360 pan. These ‘stills’ were animated and time stretched to create single component movie sequences, which when overlayed and keyed using Resolume video mixing software, generated illusions of movement, magical complexity, discrepancies, blur, multiple focal planes and voids. This mix of disparate locations captures something of our experience of place.

Wherever we are, we are looking through a memory tinted lens which we inevitably overlay onto what we see. If the present is like a 30 frame per second movie, our consciousness is running other fragmented layers simultaneously, but not necessarily at the same rates of playback. Overlap’s technique of fragmenting and re arranging vista aims for something that parallels this weave of fragments. In an Overlap landscape, harmonics are dominant and time and place non specific. Multi-layered branches abrade into water like flow, solid colour voids become doors to another place.

DESCRIPTION:

Trees & Keys – Mix 1.4, electrifies visions and arrangements of the tree. Combining their melodic-minimal music and visual multi layering, referencing the textural mastery of printmakers such as Hercules Seghers, Overlap create an atmospheric and romantic look at the middle distance tree.

The title Trees & Keys refers to both the moods of trees in relation to musical keys and the act of keying images through each other – a practice that goes back, via analogue vision mixers (TV), to the process of reworking etchings – for example Rembrandt’s adding imagery to Hercules Seghers plates years after his death.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES:

Michael Denton and Anna McCrickard formed Overlap in 1999 as a platform for music, electronic art and music industry, festival and gallery activities including single screen videos,VJing, audiovisual performances and installations. Overlap have developed a style outside film, TV and video art – a way of abstracting and combining imagery that has a musical or painterly logic rather than a narrative based or conceptual one. A visual take on serialism – wallpaper with conceits.

Recent Overlap works explore the relationship between still and moving imagery through use of discreet picture planes, obscuration techniques and implied motion within transitions. The view is in movie time but limited to flat photographic space, seen through a perceptual keyhole more akin to memories and dreams.

Overlap’s melodic minimalist music is created alongside their imagery. Experiments with sound and image are distilled into single screen pieces – Lazy Wave, Running Forest, Nearfield – useful components for mixing into audiovisual polyphonies in installations and live performances. Inspired by landscape in all its forms, their working process involves adding and removing layers, degrees of opportunism and systematized chance.

Limited edition artworks available on s[edition]. Overlap Recordings on Soundcloud.