Islands Of Consciousness
Islands Of Consciousness creates an infinite movie in realtime from images that it continously retrieves randomly from flickr.com. The selection of images is not entirely random though - every image shares at least one tag with the previously loaded and due to this restriction the movie develops a stream-of-consciousness esthetic and appears to follow a narrative structure. It also develops its own rhythm - sometimes the story seems to get stuck in a thematic dead end for minutes only to escape it into some completely unexpected direction.
A very important part in this piece is the soundtrack by the Ukrainian composer Oleg Marakov. In this piece sound samples are used like notes and get randomly arranged in realtime. This means that the soundtrack will always be different and the probability for it to ever repeat are very small. Whilst playing the music directly controls and influences the flow of images and the visual effects applied to the movie.
Islands Of Consciousness creates a stream-of-consciousness movie in realtime from images downloaded from
flickr.com which get manipulated and edited entirely random. The underlying algorithm works like a looped magnetic tape where incoming images will merge with older
materials and be influenced by the older recordings' magnetic memory.
Due to the random nature of its making the piece usually needs a few minutes to accumulate enough material in order to show its full potential.
The stream of images starts with some random image has just been added to flickr and continues by following the trail of tags the images themselves create. Each image downloaded tries to share at least one tag with the previous one. This rule leads to varying rhythms in the narrative - sometimes the story seems to get stuck for minutes in a thematic dead end but then suddenly it wanders off into a completely different direction.
All camera pans, blends, effects and glitches are induced randomly and also influenced by Oleg Marakov's soundtrack which is in itself randomly arranged from a library of sound samples and melodic elements. The samples are used like notes and are therefore prepared in different lengths. Also the pauses in between the notes are part of the composition.