40 min-long interactive audiovisual for ‘Matrices of Vision’, the debut release of experimental music artist Abigail Toll on record label Shelter Press.
Matrices of Vision is a sonic interpretation of a data set which details higher education trends in Sweden across seven decades. It is placed in conversation with artist-scholar Tiara Roxanne’s revelatory inquiries into AI bias and data colonialism, where the title references Alexander Galloway’s description of atomised points of view “flanking and flooding the world viewed”. The compositional study uses data aesthetics as a means to critically engage with the social and political mechanisms that surround us. Specifically how categorisation impacts the way we move through the world. Toll transcribes the data through the Matrices of Vision graphic score, which maps the data with frequencies that together make up the harmonic series.
I intended to describe the visual as graph shapes — straight lines, vertical sense of direction — to follow her basic compositional material. This moving visual fundamentally consists of tiny cubes which present data pieces. To absorb the logic of the sound structure into the video, I programmed the cubes to interactively transform based on the frequencies of each sound on TouchDesigner. They transform into a solid shape or sometimes infinite space as a potential extension beyond the categorisation.
This project has been displayed at an event Tranceversal Voices in 2023.