Flicker
Images that flicker, fracture, and reassemble—light, time and tech as material.
SPOORCLOUD
SPOORCLOUD
Lantana Starr | Flicker | Oolooolio
My aunt had this fish tank she never cleaned. Not neglect exactly — she had a theory about it. Said the whole point of a tank was to let it become its own thing, and if you kept interfering you were just making it about you.
SPOORCLOUD
Lantana Starr | Flicker | Oolooolio
My aunt had this fish tank she never cleaned. Not neglect exactly — she had a theory about it. Said the whole point of a tank was to let it become its own thing, and if you kept interfering you were just making it about you. By the time I was twelve that tank had an entire civilization in it. Things growing on things. Snails moving with the slow confidence of something that has never once been late. The tank had become its own ecosystem, fish included.
I thought about that tank a lot while I was making Spoorcloud.
The animation runs slow. Slower than I usually work, slower than feels comfortable, slow enough that you might think something is wrong with the file. Nothing is wrong with the file. The plant forms rise. Spores move through the air the way spores actually move, which is not dramatically. Beetles proceed with beetle priorities. Bees work the flowers the way bees work flowers, which is without ceremony and with total commitment.
Fescennine scored it, and he did what I did, which was resist. The music builds — there is a build, I promise — but mildly, the way pressure builds in a room where nothing has happened yet.
Then the creature shows up. Pink, purple, furred in a way that suggests it has never been cold a day in its life. It catches spores out of the air, one at a time, patient as a heron. An insect intervenes. Sternly. The creature leaves. The beetles and bees come back and resume their business, because they were always the ones this place belonged to.
My aunt's tank eventually cracked and had to go. She was sad about it for weeks. I asked if she wished she'd cleaned it more, taken better care. She said she didn't know what I was talking about, that tank was perfect.
Watch Spoorcloud on the Oolooolio YouTube channel HERE.
MEDITATION FOR UNWAVERING ENDURANCE WHILE BESIEGED BY UNSEEN FORCES
MEDITATION FOR UNWAVERING ENDURANCE WHILE BESIEGED BY UNSEEN FORCES
by Lantana Starr
The title is not a joke. I want to be clear about that up front.
This piece runs twenty-six minutes. It is structured in cycles — an introduction, four sections of twelve segments each, a concluding passage — and every segment holds for thirty-two seconds before the next one begins.
MEDITATION FOR UNWAVERING ENDURANCE WHILE BESIEGED BY UNSEEN FORCES
by Lantana Starr
The title is not a joke. I want to be clear about that up front.
This piece runs twenty-six minutes. It is structured in cycles — an introduction, four sections of twelve segments each, a concluding passage — and every segment holds for thirty-two seconds before the next one begins. Fescennine's score drones underneath all of it, patient and uninsistent.
What you are watching is simple: dark shapes moving through a light space, encountering forces they could not see until they arrived at them. The white is the ground. The black moves through it. And then something white emerges from inside the black, or cuts into it, or simply appears — and you realize it was always there.
Most of the encounters are quiet. A shape meets another shape. They negotiate the space between them. Sometimes the resolution is gentle. Sometimes a needle enters a circle with complete indifference to the circle's feelings about this, and there is nothing to be done about it.
Twenty-six minutes is a genuine ask. The rewards are small and they are not evenly distributed. Each new segment is a surprise, but a modest one — you will not see it coming and it will not be enormous when it arrives. This is the structure of certain kinds of endurance, and also the structure of this piece. Whether that qualifies as meditation is between you and the next thirty-two seconds.
CENOE UNDULANT
CENOE UNDULANT
by Lantana Starr
I want to talk about glamour and disgust, and how close together they actually live.
When I was building CENOE UNDULANT I kept asking myself what it would look like if a slug knew it was beautiful. Not in a compensatory way — not despite anything — but with full confidence, the way a woman in a great coat walks into a room. The answer, it turns out, is that it looks exactly like this.
CENOE UNDULANT
by Lantana Starr
I want to talk about glamour and disgust, and how close together they actually live.
When I was building CENOE UNDULANT I kept asking myself what it would look like if a slug knew it was beautiful. Not in a compensatory way — not despite anything — but with full confidence, the way a woman in a great coat walks into a room. The answer, it turns out, is that it looks exactly like this.
The environments are pure 1980s excess — reflective surfaces, neon geometry, the kind of light that makes everything look like it costs more than it does. I put soft, glistening bodies into that world — slugs, snails, and creatures that don't exist anywhere in any field guide — and let them move at their own pace. Or not at their own pace. One of my favorite things to do is get something to do the opposite of what it's known for. The slow thing launches itself across the frame. The earthbound thing lifts off. A creature built entirely for contact with the ground suddenly has no interest in the ground at all. It works because the glamour holds — they do it with complete conviction.
Everything glistens. Everything clings a little. The morphing forms stretch into shapes that have no biological precedent and don't need one.
Fescennine's score starts spare and keeps adding to itself, layer by layer, until by the end it is almost too much — which is exactly right, because that is what the visuals are doing too.
The piece ends with a perfume advertisement. Because of course it does. If you have been watching closely, you already know why.
CENOE UNDULANT by oolooolio
A constructed fragrance exploring moisture, surface, and motion. Glossed bioforms. Mineral warmth. Synthetic sheen.Designed to cling. Designed to remain.NOTES: Mucus accord / Mineral salt / Green aldehydes / Synthetic amber / Ozone trace
Full video here:
Multiplying Images: Four Videos Utilize Repeating Patterns
Jennifer Wood and Fescennine are long-time collaborators, being choreographer and composer, respectively. Here we explore four videos they created together.
maybe festivities
maybe festivities
A solo dance adjacently related to the Holidays.
Jennifer Wood and Fescennine are long-time collaborators, being choreographer and composer, respectively. Here we explore four videos they created together.
Fescennine:
I originally created the soundtrack for a different video. I was making some replacement music for a composite montage of a 2014 Suchu Dance full length show, Nebria, and kept making things and not being happy with them. This discarded piece was perfect for this video, though. The only edits I had to make were for length. The way the soundtrack and the video both jump from one thing to another with a feeling of …anxiety maybe? I think that’s what made it work. When I watch it I imagine Jennifer is someone who really doesn’t like the holidays much, and feels obligated to entertain or shop, but is having an anxious inner dialog about it.
Jennifer Wood:
When capturing the original footage, I set a timer for each clip where I was only doing movement for a short span of time. So that dictated the nature of the quick changes between clips. Since it is all just me alone in a white space with a string light, I began to multiply myself when I was wishing for more of an ensemble feeling. I really began looking at the relationship between the pink and red colors against the white. I was focused on the patterns the movements and contrasting colors created when in a mirror image or multiplied many times.”
“When I watch it I imagine Jennifer is someone who really doesn’t like the holidays much.”
Jennifer Wood:
“I had made a previous (as yet unreleased) video of myself in my Bangalore apartment with my favorite white wall and white floor. So this time around, still not feeling like going outside to a location, I was faced with the same set up and needed something, anything, to be different. I had this string light from Christmas that I never put away because, well, it was really cheerful. Usually I kept it dangling looped on my wall, but for the video I strung it across the room. That’s it. My big change.
My apartment is very noisy during the day from things going on outside but I was planning on working with it and keeping the ambient sounds. Well that wasn’t working when I got to editing, so I decided to try putting some music with it. This piece from Fescennine was the first one I tried and it was perfect.”
In the Park
In the Park
Physical Training Becomes Art
A man, wearing a weekend’s worth of stubble, brown sandals with velcro clasps, a red t-shirt, navy shorts and a stunning fanny pack/belt bag to match, walks into a public park and proceeds to do an array of physical exercises.
We are in Bangalore, India, as a man uses exercise equipment. Reality becomes skewed as the human body and equipment are broken into fractured images.
A friend who is a resident of Bangalore, was the unwitting star of Jennifer Wood’s video. Using footage captured (with permission of course) while he was exercising in a public park, Wood took the clips and transformed them into a series of kaleidoscopic images. Due to the repetitive movements of the exercises, a visual and auditory rhythm is created along with the ambient sounds of the city and its creatures: birds, rustling trees, distant traffic and the clank of the machines.
Said Friend:
“I had asked Jennifer to video me exercising so I could prove to my friends back home that I had really started exercising. Without proof they would never believe me. I didn’t know she was going to make a psychedelic video out of it!”
“When this video was taken, I was just beginning my journey out of depression. Exercise was my first step.”
“When this video was taken, I was just beginning my journey out of depression. Exercise was my first step.”
Jennifer Wood
I love the unsteady trembling motion of the hand held camera in this case. As a dancer I know, the body is in constant motion, even when standing still. I also enjoyed the effort in some of the exercises. This is in a public park. Most of the parks I’ve seen here have this same basic equipment anyone can use. Some of the equipment is unusual to me; I’m American and this park is in India. For example the yellow wheelie things I find so amusing.
The man’s human body, in the video, is fractured and rejoined making some strange creatures. Sometimes his body almost completely disappears and it seems the equipment is moving by itself. Other times he is dehumanised entirely, headless with his red shirt becoming the multiple petals of a strange flower.
Radiant
Radiant
from a simple line drawing, Fescennine and Jennifer Wood conspired to make this exuberant video
Fescennine:
“In 2015 I created this music for the Suchu Dance production of begin wide which was based on radioactivity. The performers were all in electric blue and the set was a stripped black box theater. I wanted to keep the music full of energy but be a little cold.
“I was inspired by the formations of choreographer Busby Berkely in those depression-era Hollywood extravaganzas.”
Jennifer Wood:
“This video is based on a simple line drawing which you can see as the very last image before the credits.
In manipulating the lines of the drawing, I was inspired by the formations of choreographer Busby Berkely in those depression-era Hollywood extravaganzas. Berkely intentionally choreographed his dances to have many sections filmed from above. From that perspective, one can see the numerous dancers making formations, flowing from one shape to another.
Sweet
Sweet
From a quick photo taken of a view in a park, this candy confection is made.
Pink gardens shift to the sounds of a deconstructed, lush ballad.
Jennifer Wood:
“When I first arrived in Bangalore, it was kind of by accident, definitely not planned. That was in July 2019 and I’m still there. Early in my stay I would wander my area and spend time in the numerous parks. In the photo used to make Sweet, I was attempting to capture the magnitude of the height and size of these palm trees and the portal they created. I was just learning and doing some first experiments with this kind of image manipulation.
“This particular track is a deconstruction of “Some Enchanted Evening” by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein, in a recording sung by Frank Sinatra.”
Jennifer Wood:
I changed the color of green to pink. When I did that, the complexity of the leaves, vines and foliage suddenly appeared as a kind of lace. Also the symmetry and triangulation of the moving parts kind of look like a muff to me.”
Fescennine: “Tee-hee”
Jennifer Wood: “Well it does.”
Fescennine:
“The music used in this video is from the Suchu Dance production Ella Paradise, which was a very surreal, dream-like show. The majority of the music for that show consisted of deconstructed music from the early to mid 20th century. This particular track is a deconstruction of “Some Enchanted Evening” by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein, in a recording sung by Frank Sinatra.”