In 2023, I set myself another creative challenge for the year, this was the fifth time I have worked on either a daily or weekly yearly challenge. For 2023, I choose a weekly creation task for a number of reasons. Primarily, like all of these challenges, it is to keep working, focusing and creating new material. I also used this project as an opportunity. to develop skills and understanding of how I could push technology, in particular digital workstations (both video and audio ) and capture devices (camera and recording devices).

fifty two // manifesto

For the 2023 fifty two project I once again set myself a manifesto with the following requirements for each piece: meant that

• each piece had to be more than 3 minutes long.

• each piece had to consist of a video, audio track and be accompanied by a quote.

• each piece and quote had to reflect how I felt and my perceptions of the world at that point in time.

• each piece had to feature something organic and real. Something that had been actually physically recorded (both visually and sonically). These could be synthesised sound but they had to have ‘moved’ air and be sampled at some point.

As a result I was forced to dig deep into my sample and video collection and also process a lot of field, natural and even recordings from the videos that were made to accompany their their tracks. This approach was the same for the video, and I was really interested in creating glitchy experimental footage and really pushing the video processors that I had to their limits, whilst ensuring that whatever was captured was purely organic that had been shot in some unique manner.

The majority of the footage was shot on my camera phone using some experimental techniques and angles, and I was always looking for ways to create interesting images out of the lens position and proximity to objects. I'm will write a more about some of the processes that I created for this as well as how I used the camera to create what I think are interesting textures and images.

software

Most of the tracks were created both visually and sonically with Reaper using most of the stock video processor scripts. which I not only tried to push to the limit, I also had fun automating the parameters with LFOs and audio side chaining.

Along with the Reaper’s video processor, I used my standard suite of audio processing plugins, once again trying to push them to do things that perhaps they weren’t designed for. This was in addition to using ‘out of the box’ processing, primarily running tracks through cassette machines and into guitar effects pedals to once again create what I think are interesting sonic textures.

The fifty two project is very much about texture because I felt that expressing my perception of the world was best represented through resonance and texture, rather than melody and harmony. I also feel that texture and the sonic worlds that I created served to summarise and resemble my mental state throughout the year and the project.

playlist

on reflection

As stated at the start, I am a strong believer and advocate of the daily/weekly challenge approach to creativity. It provides the creative person with not only an approach to getting into a creative flow state, but the ability to focus and get work finished. Whilst not every piece is a work of greatness, there are seeds of ideas which can be then developed in a more fully formed piece of work. In addition, there are some real gems which just appear and end up becoming (at least in my case) new favourites.

The use of quotes to accompany the pieces was part of the method to help me explore the themes of the project (and the majority of my work), namely the exploration of human experience, perception, and the wonder of existence. Across the various quotes that were chosen on a weekly basis depending primarily on my mood, energy and feelings at the time, there seems to be a recurring contemplation on the interplay between light and darkness, both metaphorically and literally, which link to the descriptions of the pieces themselves which serve to highlight my mental state and exploration thereof. The exploration of memory and psychological state is part of the thematic motivation for the project, where inner visions, monologues, dreams formed in the deep recesses of the mind, serve to create a metaphorical landscape filled with illusions, optic sensations, ghosts and echoes of the past.

Space and time also seem to emerge as recurring motifs, again something which on reflection have always been (and perhaps always will be) part of my creative drive and vision, where their significance and relationship link my mind, state and externalities from the real world. The works delve into the complexities of mental states, touching on ideas such as madness, fear, and the nature of my ego and it’s thoughts, with an emphasis on the subjective and abstract aspects of my (human?) perception.

in summary

In summary, the fifty two project 2023 serves as a visual and sonic diary of self, weaving a work of extremely personal unfiltered reflections, inviting the audience to contemplate the human condition, the choices we make, and the profound, sometimes elusive, aspects of our existence. I hope that fifty two 2023 produces a thought-provoking mosaic of ideas that span the realms of philosophy, psychology, and the expressions of the human soul.

complete video (4 hours 45 minutes)

complete list of titles

• synaptic distortion

• lucid insomnia

• optic

• camomile

• of sand and fog

• dust

• amporhous memory

• congest

• the spirit of dark water

• a272

• engram

• malibu spaghetti

• metamorph

• underground subconscious

• synaptic disturbance

• current state of mind

• illusions of existence

• sensorial decay

• drone fields

• wisp

• deconstructing light

• spectral release

• sensorial manipulation

• empty vessel

• equinox I 

• equinox II

• equinox III

• withdrawal

• clouds of multiple colour

• klasm

• sonder

• thoughts and prayers

• infect

• night illusions

• brain Fog

• exist

• reconnection

• portmanteau

• insomatic

• carbonised

• sensual inferno

• cortexual overload

• vertigo

• displacement

• rise up

• fractured psyche

• trapped

• loophole

• downside downfall

• the night before the end

• fade to darkness

fifty two quotes for 2023

1. The margins of the space were bright without illuminating anything or casting shadows, sharp and terrible. It reminded her of the way schizophrenics and people suffering migraines would describe light as assaulting and dangerous." // James Corey, Cibola Burn

2. "You're never really asleep, and you're never really awake...nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy." // Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

3. "Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light." // Claude Debussy

4. "His mother put him to bed, and made some camomile tea: 'One table-spoonful to be taken at bedtime.'" // Beatrix Potter

5. "The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process." // Virginia Woolf

6. "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." // T.S. Eliot

7. "Time moves in one direction, memory in another." // William Gibson

8. "Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal." // Albert Camus

9. "It will rain all this night and we will sleep transfixed by the dark water as our blood runs through our fragile life." // Charles Bukowski

10. "Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning." // Aldous Huxley

11. "In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom." // J.G. Ballard

12. "Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed." // J.G. Ballard

13. "I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself." // Kafka

14. "Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren't susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place." // Eno

15. "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." // Edgar Allan Poe

16. "The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract." // Klee

17. "Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning." // Huxley

18. "All things that have form eventually decay." // Kishimoto

19. "Those who can't remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever." // Fisher

20. "All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors." // Lacan

21. "There is no joy in this art, there is no joy in its creation." // Bruce

22. "The past cannot be forgotten, the present cannot be remembered." // Mark Fisher

23. "If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present." // Wittgenstein

24. "The empty vessel makes the loudest sound." // Shakespeare

25. "Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments." // Foucault

26. "Why is it always raining here? Or is that just the sound of the television, tuned to a dead channel?" // Fisher

27. "A cynic who 'believes only his eyes' misses the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, and how it structures our experience of reality." // Fisher

28. "What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle." // Rumi

29. "What greater torment than to see that light, and then to see it eternally withdrawn?" // Iris Murdoch

30. "We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." // Plato

31. "Success ruins artists." // Eno

32. "Sonder — n. the realization that each random passer-by is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness." // Koenig

33. "The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts." // Aurelius

34. "We all see only that which we are trained to see." // Robert Anton Wilson

35. "Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn." // Gandhi

36. "There's no clarity. There was never meant to be clarity." // Bukowski

37. "To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer, The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end." // Shakespeare

38. "In the human mind, the number of possible connections that can be made between neurons greatly exceeds the number of atoms in the universe." // Alan Moore

39. "And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the Tulgey wood, And burbled as it came!" // Carroll

40. "We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning." // Baudrillard

41. "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." // Camus

42. "In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost." // Dante

43. "The eerie is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something." // Fisher

44. "In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors." // Blake

45. "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." // Harper Lee

46. "Underneath all reason lies delirium and drift." // Deleuze

47. "Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings." // Coelho

48. "Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why." // Vonnegut

49. "Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement." // Camus

50. "We are our choices." // Sartre

51. "Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." // Shaw

52. About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.” // Jung

Here are all fifty two tracks in a time compressed version….nearly 5 hours of audio/visual works compressed to 3 minutes!

Off into 2024 and a new daily creation project called ‘This is england 2024’….wish me luck!