Meta Post Cards
I explore innovative ways to create unique souvenirs without relying on AI. My 'Rewind' series features fictitious postcards inspired by the people and places of St Leonards and Hastings, which I remix into evolving visual experiences using brainwave and audio signals.
Employing VDMX software, favoured by VJs, I apply dynamic video effects triggered by music through an audio analysis plugin. These visuals constantly transform in real-time, responding to live audio streams and MIDI signals from a 2-channel EEG device central to my work. This process creates an improvised, immersive journey that reimagines familiar scenes through the interplay of sound and brainwaves.
The 'Neuro-Seaside Postcards' transcend the limitations of smartphone photos by blending personal emotion, artistic expression, and nostalgia. Each postcard may even feature a section where brainwave patterns are visually represented, capturing the sender's emotional state. This innovative approach merges past and present, turning memories into tangible, shareable art. For those who appreciate meaningful and unique experiences, these postcards offer a contemporary twist on the nostalgic charm of vintage seaside imagery.
The source material is a mixture of traditionally printed vintage portraits and black and white amateur photography of family & party scenes purchased locally, stripped down in PS into layers, then recombined & interpolated in an interactive live session with current iconic scenes, local landmarks, and graffiti, where themes are more about the changes in gentrified social culture rather than the human inhabitants. - click here to see 'Rewind'.
Expressing temporality and changes, everyone displaces another occupant, and residents dissolve but the buildings cling to a persistence. Heritage is admired and ignored but by previous and future generations for societal reasons, what is new is now old. The ambitious Victorian architect James Burton's family pyramid tomb current, the 1930s Marine Court seafront flats and Sydney Little's underground car park & Bottle Alley feature often convey the essence of local heritage.
Two images below were unplanned, their sources were mixed from 4 layers playing together, as the realtime streamed audio analysis responses are adjusting the 4 video layers, generated live footage which I sampled screen stills from to make a subset of 'meta post cards' a lack of authorship experienced in metatextual postcard material.
These two versions are stills from sound-triggered videos involving all of the postcards, the direction is no longer under control and anomalies take the lead in representing how the postcards appear, ever-changing. Below are some of my digital collages created manually in Photoshop using real portraits and current local scenes, expressed in a new way tourists can never experience. These were made into movie files and used in the generation of new Meta Post Cards, where I relinquish aesthetic control in this engaging process.
A very short video to look at the melting FX in action, where new versions of the postcards and portraits I have made are emerging
The following images are from No Hammer Needed 2023 installation with a participant experiencing a Dreamachine, remixed with the postcards and small. objects captured in 3D using photogrammetry and liDar, using my club visuals aesthetic to remix the installation, as it felt , with a more remote, inner space that cannot be seen
