Islands Of Consciousness

When Oleg Marakov pointed out the similarities between his piece of randomly arranged music Islands and my random movie creator Flickeur it was immediately clear that a combination of both projects would definitely result in something very interesting.

The result of this fusion - Islands of Consciousness - is not a simple combination of the two concepts but a great advancement. Sound and Images enter a very close relationship in which the randomly arranged musical phrases are taking direct influence on the visual outcome. So when you look at this piece keep in mind that all the visuals are assembled in realtime using photos downloaded from Flickr.com. All the transitions and effects are entirely random and only happening on you screen. Other people will see a movie and hear a soundtrack that is totally different from yours.

Whilst the basic idea of Flickeur - an endless virtual videoloop that is in perpetual metamorphosis - has remained I have altered the visual engine and the image selection algoritm in many aspects. I have added several new elements to the visual grammar and there are now permanent as well as temporary manipulations applied to the material. The selection of the images is not totally random but follows an associative stream-of-consciousness rule - each new image shares at least one tag with the previous one. As you will see this creates a visual rhythm that follows certain thematic patterns. Sometimes the story seems to get caught for minutes in a monothematic impasse but then suddenly it escapes it and heads into the strangest compositions of seemingly non-related topics.

The infinite soundtrack is built upon Oleg Marakov's idea to run multiple mp3 players parallel in shuffle mode just like musicians playing different instruments. In this case the instruments are not only pianos or synths but also natural atmospheres and sound effects. Islands of Consciousness consists of four parallel layers: Layer one plays synth background pads, layer two is the piano track, layer three holds ambient atmospheres and layer four contains all kinds of different sounds and effects. Just like in a regular composition the sounds vary in length and in fidelity and a very important part is also the space in between the notes - the pauses of different duration.

There are about 40 MB of sound fragments that will be downloaded for the complete piece. Still you should hear random sound phrases pretty quickly even if you have a slow connection as the internal sound library accumulates samples dynamically. Though it must be noted that with a slow connection the probability is higher to hear repetitions more often. The same goes for the visuals - with a faster connection you will notice a higher rate-of-change between the the images.

In the right column you can see all the images that were downloaded from flickr together with their titles and their owners' names and if you click on them you can see them unaltered and in full size.