Livestreaming works with the immediacy of live theater, while allowing for the juxtaposition of images that comes with editing. The benefit of this format is that it exists to curate and foster collective experience.
What I’m primarily interested in is film as an audiovisual medium - the synthesis of images and sound. The Media Landscape is a compositional process and the result in the same thing. It’s building a framework with words, images, and sound that functions in different ways to contextualize finding juxtaposition in real time through collaboration. It’s building a framework to allow art to happen to you, and everyone else.
Each Media Landscape project begins with an idea, and a structure. There is no predetermined canon or continuity; it is the collective engagement and interpretation that can bring forth any sense of causality. You create the framing, but the purpose only reveals itself when it happens. The less information and preparation ahead of time, the more you allow it to be guided by others. It’s not about the result - it’s the process itself.
The basis of film is composing for the frame. This is the shot - which in building visual sequences, functions like words and sentences, each new addition affecting perception of the rest. In the media landscape, the focus is not as heavily focusing on the larger shot but how images create meaning by how they fit, enter or leave within the context of the wider frame. It’s the same thing, really - just articulated differently for this purpose.
The format of The Media Landscape functions to lend itself towards a digital format as a moving, breathing digital collage assembled in real time. As opposed to the granular moving nature of film - image compression reiterates information until something moves. Motion stands out within a still frame - gifs and video, draggable assets create a greater sense of transformation.
The titles serve different purposes but are also largely formatted to create variations on the idea of a pulpy novel sequence, relevant to the individual work, but you can call them anything.
Music and visuals influence how people interact with the work through their input. Music creates pace, largely setting the tone for the information provided. Phone calls and input function similarly as others are able to dictate and articulate specific ideas, including the rate at which they come in, moving the pace. The use of tts expresses more neutral voicing - often serving as a mimic, shaping the form by reiterating to create motifs from input.
In saying this, I would like to note that there are infinite ways to articulate this concept. More than any particular construction, The Media Landscape is something you sit with in real time, as each new piece changes the context in which you view the whole.
The first Media Landscape is a distillation of this - using digital imagery and input in almost kind of an algorithmic feeling building to fully reflect individualized digital worlds, endless incoming media messages and conversations that each articulate a new connective variation of thought.
Using The False Scent as an example - I attempted to articulate the feeling of “true crime” imagery while leaving the information as vague as possible. Bold, futura-looking red text almost selling you the opportunity to create narratives of others based on images and given information, taking that to an end based on personal context.
The Mind Windmill is the most heavily structured as it is pre-recorded with prompts but an experiment in setting ideas and making connections based on the direction of others. Wave imagery combined with the constantly erasing and shifting shaky live drawn imagery results in a sense of ephemerality, which more clearly defines the constants within.
I cannot speak on the exact creation or thoughts on the prompts - but my friend Dana (add link here) has also done several Media Landscapes now in variations that I find particularly exciting and fun. The April Tool plays with direct observational narrative, setting the scene towards a particular goal, and The Media Landscape: Telepathon is a fun abstraction of interpersonal projection. (NOTE TO SELF: Expand on this or better define)
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The Media Landscape is something not specific to one person but a specific approach that can be performed by anyone at any time, anywhere. This is The Media Landscape of the 21st century.