Max Cooper | Void

Max Cooper:

"I wanted to try and render the cold dark void of emptiness with this chapter, which meant some darkroom industrial sounds, and lots of power. I started by making binaural recordings of Antony Gormley sculptures, clanging them, scraping them, tapping them etc, with permission, and without damaging them of course! Some of the large sculptures in particular created these huge resonances as the metal surfaces bowed at their natural low frequency, it was a lot of fun to work with, and sounds pretty mad on a big system.

For the video, rather than just going black screen, I thought a lo-fi approach could work, focused on simplicity, intensity and the use of parallax to create the appearance of distance with infinite vanishing points. Jessica In created a super intense moire-pattern version of this idea which fits the audio perfectly, and forms one of the most intense moments of the live show. For the live show I also layer over some infinite cityscape imagery on the gauze screen, blended with the abstractions, to link back in the human side of the story."

Jessica In:

"The visuals for Void are an exploration in pseudo-perspective. The animated drawing study is composed entirely of straight lines programmed to shift and interpolate through a series of motion cycles. The resulting moiré and kinegram lines create a series of rectangular voids which shift to waves, inverted view cones and back again. Utilising the notion of the straight intended mark, versus the perceived (but never drawn) curving forms, the two-dimensional lines explore illusionary depth and space expanding and contracting as the drawing progresses in time."