Seven Marseille Morning Minutes, 3X

3-CHANNEL VIDEO/SOUND INSTALLATION. The video project Seven Marseille Morning Minutes includes both single and multi-channel versions. The three-channel installation is described below. Each version aims to explore the sensory experience of landscape, particularly as a function of the moving image. At the same time, these works seek to reflect critically and aesthetically—by visual and sonic means—on the complex connections between seriality, repetition, difference, simultaneity, and spatiality, as well as the effects these have on or through subjective spatial memory.

MAIN VIDEO CHANNEL:

Seven shots in succession, each 1 minute long, comprise the core of the main video, its first sequence. Six additional sequences ensue, with the original seven-image series repeated in further, successive, randomly ordered series (hence: the second sequence comprises 14 shots; the third, 21 shots; the fourth, 28 shots; and so on). With each successive sequence, the shot duration is reduced incrementally as the number of shots in each sequence increases…

…the foreshortening of shot duration is achieved by an effective increase in play-back speed for each shot, and the magnitude of this temporal compression is sufficient to reduce the total running time of each new sequence by precisely one minute. Hence, the seventh and final sequence consists of 49 shots (seven series of seven shots, each proceeding in random order), with each shot lasting exactly 1/49^th of one minute (1.22 secs). The visual effect is that of time-lapse photography.

LATERAL VIDEO CHANNELS:

Four distinct shots will comprise each of the second and third video channels, respectively. Each of the four shots will last precisely seven minutes, for a total running time of 28 minutes (that is, the exact total running time of the video for Channel 1). Each of the four shots comprise static framings and subtle shifts in light, with slight physical movements of elements of mise-en-scène, such as the rustling of a mesh drapery or the fluttering of a shadow…

seven marseille morning minutes: from the inside looking out…

…seven marseille morning minutes: from the outside looking in

Throughout the simultaneous interplay of the three video channels, traces of human presence will effectively “haunt” the Marseille landscape beyond. Meanwhile, layers of ambient, scavenged, archival, and original sounds–some already recorded on-site in Marseille in 2013– will be united in a complex sonic environment, or soundscape, to augment the visual and mnemonic experience of landscape perception generated by the video installation.