Years by Bartholomäus Traubeck,

Wow!!! This project, also on Creative Applications Network, blew me away. The concept is incredible and the output truly stunning. The audio in this video I would listen to regardless of it’s origin. The fact that it came from the ring pattern of a tree exports it into another dimension. It has connections with the ideas I have been having with the relationship between audio and visual data, albeit in reverse. I was thinking of ending this exploration with data/imagery/audio for my MA and return to more traditional practice, but the more I delve the more I feel like getting further involved.

It is interesting to read that in order to create Traubeck’s piece seen here, he had to put a ruleset in place. This was spoken of in my meeting with Hugh and Alise last week. Alise was highlighting the need to apply parameters and then apply these self-imposed parameters across the whole project – a ruleset by any other name! Without these rules in place it would then become ‘more’ subjective as I could tweak the output to my liking which then defeats the object of letting the date speak for itself. What I am thinking at present is to record a person speaking their name, convert it into an image (the part of process I am figuring out at the moment) then back to audio. As an excercise it highlights the issue of truth and the process. Each time, be it once or multiple times, an image, and audio for that matter, is processed something is changed which distances it from the truth. Furthermore, as Ekhart Tolle’s premise in his book The Power of Now, what you are seeing does not even exist anymore. It is just a memory and so processing an image is it just a memory of a memory. Taking this yet further still, a Jpegs’ compression display differently from machine to machine (some machines have huge differences); is this a duplicate, an original or does anyone care is probably more the point?