| Mandala 1991,
Colour, 40 minutes, 1” C-format master |
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Mandala was a new departure after a break of several years, and used a more accessible sound track than earlier pieces. Unlike earlier videos, all the imagery was initially digitally generated and then transformed through a wide variety of analogue and digital techniques. Despite these complex technical interventions, the overall quality retains considerable fluidity and sometimes striking relationships to the natural world. The boundaries between art and science, technology and nature, dissolve, revealing their true interconnection. The analogue and digital feedback techniques used relate closely to the discovery of and interest in chaos theory and fractals developing at that time in other contexts. The inter-dependency of states of order and chaos are explored and revealed. Mandala was created by alternating sessions of live image processing with conventional video editing. The music was developed and intermixed throughout this process so that neither the sound nor the image led the other too directly. This sympathetically extended the “performance” elements of earlier pieces, where the two aspects had taken place completely simultaneously, and allowed this longer and more complex piece of work to be created. The video was realised over a period of a few months using the Videokalos synthesiser in conjunction with Diverse Production’s post-production facility. It
is constructed in seven sections with the last mirroring the first - a
structural device that is intended to suggest the cyclic nature of
universal processes. The overall work is very “centred” visually, and
is intended to stimulate a “centering” of consciousness in a similar
spirit to the mandalas of some Eastern religions. The tape has
meditative qualities, but not in the often-used passive sense of the
word - meditations can be very dynamic processes.
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