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Always a Lag
Video with sound, 5:56 duration, 2020
No matter how clear and direct, communication is coloured by the medium through which it passes. Something indefinable is always lost, but often, things are added as well. Emergent entities, ghosts, mutations inhabit the periphery of our messages, arising from a momentary lag in a video-call, a muffled voice in the background of a recording, the faint reflection of a face on a screen. As messages are passed back and forth, reproduced once-twice-three times, these minute intruders grow and change shape, assuming comic or frightening proportions.
THIRTYMINUTES has always thrived on this process: cannibalizing each other’s ideas, stepping on each other’s toes, responding to one another by mutating. Before this project, our collaboration had proceeded only in a circle of responses, limited by the half hour we each spent working on a piece, and the strict one-minute time-limit for any audio or video produced. Always a Lag is our first larger scale work as a collective, allowing ourselves the luxury of engaging more deeply with our catalogue of material. The piece is a mixed audio/video presentation, built out of composed and improvised instrumental sounds, field recordings, found-footage, and visuals culled from the hours we spent working in isolation during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. The piece is a seance, or a summoning of sorts; an attempt to invoke the unintentional beings that emerge from our endless game of telephone.
Sound and video by THIRTYMINUTES
No matter how clear and direct, communication is coloured by the medium through which it passes. Something indefinable is always lost, but often, things are added as well. Emergent entities, ghosts, mutations inhabit the periphery of our messages, arising from a momentary lag in a video-call, a muffled voice in the background of a recording, the faint reflection of a face on a screen. As messages are passed back and forth, reproduced once-twice-three times, these minute intruders grow and change shape, assuming comic or frightening proportions.
THIRTYMINUTES has always thrived on this process: cannibalizing each other’s ideas, stepping on each other’s toes, responding to one another by mutating. Before this project, our collaboration had proceeded only in a circle of responses, limited by the half hour we each spent working on a piece, and the strict one-minute time-limit for any audio or video produced. Always a Lag is our first larger scale work as a collective, allowing ourselves the luxury of engaging more deeply with our catalogue of material. The piece is a mixed audio/video presentation, built out of composed and improvised instrumental sounds, field recordings, found-footage, and visuals culled from the hours we spent working in isolation during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. The piece is a seance, or a summoning of sorts; an attempt to invoke the unintentional beings that emerge from our endless game of telephone.
Sound and video by THIRTYMINUTES
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