A Video Art Piece
I went on a walk to Pebble Beach in Brooklyn and recorded waves crashing against the shore. The raw footage captured the natural rhythm and movement of water, including its constant motion, its patterns, and its unpredictability. Alongside the waves, I also captured general NYC cityscape footage, creating visual material that represented both natural and urban environments, drawing a contrast between the abstract and the representational.
All the editing was done in real time using Signal Culture applications. I worked through multiple passes with different tools. First, I did a run through with Signal Culture's Video Mixer, then another pass with the Frame Buffer, and finally a run through with Re:Trace. Each layer added new dimensions to the footage, transforming the raw recordings into something abstract and hypnotic. The real-time nature of the process meant every decision was immediate and intuitive, with no room for traditional post-production refinement.
After completing the video processing, I composed music in real time as I watched back the edited video. Working in Logic Pro while playing on my keyboard, I improvised chords and melodies that responded directly to the visual rhythm on screen. The music was composed entirely in the moment, reacting to the ebb and flow of the processed footage. This approach created an organic connection between sound and image, where neither dominated but instead worked in harmony.
This was a highly enlightening experience because it was my first attempt doing something non-narrative. Working entirely in real time pushed me out of my comfort zone, because there was no safety net of post-production and no ability to revise and perfect. Every decision had to be made in the moment, trusting intuition over calculation. I think it came out quite nicely, but of course, it's not necessarily story-based, which I still do not know how I feel about. Coming from a narrative background, the absence of traditional structure was both liberating and unsettling. WAVES represents my first steps into experimental video art and real-time audiovisual composition. It's ultimately a big departure from my usual work but it opened up new ways of thinking about moving images and sound.