Ecstasy Trilogy

Here are three ambient movies that I put online recently, each of them about 30 minutes long: "Mouse Pointer Feedback Ecstasy", "Arboreal Ecstasy", "Symmetric Jellyfish Ecstasy". Wow, 90 minutes of ecstasy?

Ecstasy is not something we usually encounter in our daily lives, and different people have very different ideas about what it is. I just saw that Wikipedia has three different definitions!

The effect of the videos on the observer will vary, but all of them slow down time like the motion of liquid in lava lamps, or like Marian Zazeela's extremely slow ornamental videos to La Monte Young's drone music.

For the MTV generation that is used to very fast and hectic cuts, this will be unbearable to watch :)

1. Mouse Pointer Feedback Ecstasy



I used a toy microscope and filmed the microscope output on the screen - I pointed the microscope to its own images. This creates a video feedback loop, resulting in all sorts of effects. Because nothing much happens when filming an empty screen, resulting in more of nothing, I chose to film the mouse pointer from very close. Some postprocessing was applied (mainly, slowing down). The music is ambient music that I played on synthesizers and tape delays, back in the mid-eighties.


2. Arboreal Ecstasy



This was the first video designed to use as a backdrop for Georgina Brett's set on my livelooping festival from last April. I filmed these trees out of my car while driving through forests in Washington and Northern California (usually, Sabine was driving and I held the camera). Postprocessing: Slowing down and some motion blur, and a mirror effect at the bottom of the video, to take out the street that was visible in the original. The mirror creates a nice effect that looks like a reflection on water.

I chose Georgina's piece Leanate as soundtrack for this, and I slowed it down considerably using Paulstretch. Then two weeks before the festival it turned out that someone else had also planned to use trees for a backdrop video, so I dropped this, and created something new for Georgina:


3. Symmetrical Jellyfish Ecstasy



I had filmed these amazing creatures in an aquarium in Oregon. Postprocessing included slowing down, changing the colors, and introducing symmetry. The music I chose for this imagery consisted of a loop I had created a while ago (I have forgotten in the meantime how I did it); during the piece, several instances of this loop, running at different speeds, get superimposed.

Georgina's gorgeous set with the jellyfish video behind her can be watched here.