break me, 2020
break me, madeira is an audiovisual collaboration that sets generative visual art, inspired primarily by Paul Klee, to electro-acoustic music. Instead of being driven by the audio waveform of the music, the visuals are driven solely through the human perception and experience of the music and is an exploration in making seemingly abstract connections more concrete.
This project brings together a plethora of technologies that took the form of an audiovisual piece. It started with a desire to re-create synesthesia. Taking inspiration from Paul Klee’s May Picture, we started to recreate aspects of it that were interesting, but in code. We found that one of the challenges with computationally generated is that “perfect” shapes do not invite interest, since that is what we expect from machines. So we started to add imperfections that added interest the the piece. In terms of sounds, there is a lot of machinery-inspired soundscapes that take the audience through different worlds and the visuals keep up continually, creating an audiovisual experience in which the audio and visuals come across as abstract entities that respond to one another and keep displaying concrete connections.
This project initially started because I was on a 24-hour flight journey from USA to India and was staring at a Paul Klee painting that was my phone wallpaper. The long journey gave me an opportunity to look at the art for longer than I had ever done previously. In an art gallery, there's usually so many pieces to look at and limited time but on a plane it felt like I had forever to look at the painting. As I stared at it, I started to see all the things that made it interesting and beautiful, and hence started on the journey to find that beauty in my own audiovisual works.
