IDEATION
White Night Melbourne 2016.
A monumental scale mapped video projection and spatial sound installation for White Night, Melbourne. In collaboration with Nick Azidis (PROJECTIONTEKNIK) and Adem Jaffers.
Creative Director/Producer/Projection Artist: Nick Azidis
Co-Producer/Sound Designer: Lisa Greenaway
Co-Producer/Video Compositor/Animator: Adem Jaffers
Co-Director/Writer: Bentley Dean
Commissioned by State Library Victoria for White Night Melbourne, 2016
Video & Projection Technology: TDC
Audio Technology: MAV
Featuring excerpts from Beethoven’s ‘Concerto No. 5, in E-flat Major, Op. 73 ("Emperor")’
Piano in the opening: Victor Greenaway
First voice: Lisa Greenaway
Second voice (spirit of the library): Magdalena Nowacka
IDEATION explores the idea of the library as a terrarium of the mind, an ecosystem of imagination. IDEATION played for 12 hours overnight in State Library Victoria’s LaTrobe Reading Room for White Night Melbourne, 20 February 2016, experienced by more than 21,000 people.
Designed for the soaring, six-stories-high domed Reading Room, the sound for IDEATION was constructed in collaboration with the technicians at MAV. We designed a system that could give us fully immersive, controlled and directional spatial sound, accounting for the immense reflective qualities of the room. We installed 4 speaker pairs in the middle balcony, plus 2 speaker pairs and 2 sub-woofers in the central podium. We were able to mix and control the sound from the reading room floor via a tablet interface - this meant that as the night progressed and the room’s reflections changed the qualities of the sounds, we could adapt.
I designed the soundscape for quadro + LFE, spatially locating and rotating various sounds to follow and lead visual movement of the mapped projection. The bed of electronic music composition and drum rhythms mixed through the whole space, using the room reflections to build physical effects. The soundscape works intricately with the visuals to take us on a journey through the inception of an idea, building to a crescendo.
This is a very complex construction, including my own recordings and compositions and archival / found material ranging from bellbirds in the Dandenongs, an Athens train line, sung passages from the Qur'an and bible songs from children in India, to recorded voices from the Golden Records launched with the Voyager spacecraft in 1977. The musical theme of IDEATION is a section of Beethoven’s ‘Concerto No. 5, in E-flat Major, Op. 73 ("Emperor")’. Recording my father learning how to play this piece on the piano gave me the conceptual basis for this work. We hear him playing, tentatively, in the opening. Through the work, the melody is teased out, growing ever more complex, until it is realised at the end in a 1938 orchestral recording. The quotes spoken by the 'spirit of the library' midway through the piece are taken from those engraved into the La Trobe Reading Room walls.
Animation, stereo
This video features the animation strip that was mapped and projected onto the Reading Room’s walls, with a stereo mix of the full audio.
White Night
TDC’s capture of the work at White Night.
(Audio quality is not great in this video, taken from the video camera.)
360° interactive video
Watch this video in the YouTube app on your smart phone to get the full 360° experience inside the Dome at White Night.
(Audio quality is not great in this video, taken from the video camera.)
Artist statement
The process of building IDEATION in many ways reflects the concept itself. Thinking about responding to the spectacular institution of the State Library of Victoria, in particular its grand Latrobe Reading Room, Nick wanted to do something political, something dangerous, something that would trigger inspiration in audiences to look at the world with a more holistic spirit. He sought out Lisa, Adem and Bentley, as artists who could approach a big, complex idea with open minds. Nick has known Lisa and Adem since the early ‘90s; the association with Bentley is more recent but just as simpatico. On meeting, these four minds collided and the concept grew towards being a positive message of the interconnectedness of all things, with an underlying ecological message that we ignore these connections at our peril.
The dome is a terrarium, a container of human experience, constantly growing. Standing on this threshold, we can explore both inside and out. We can travel anywhere, learn anything. It is the ideal place to explore the conception of an idea.
Telling the story of the forming of an idea, from inside, is telling the story of connection; the story of everything. From the moment of conception we are learning. Inside the womb, we can hear the world around us. As we are born we are born connected to history, nature and knowledge. If we focused on the things that connect us, rather than the things that divide us, what could we create?
All elements in this project have one thing in common: the changing nature of knowledge and patterns of growth that exist everywhere in nature. Fingers of hands. Tendrils and roots of stalks and bulbs. Synapses of brains. Are the patterns the same? Lightning strikes, electricity, rivers, deltas. Musical harmonies, languages, songs. Social groups, solar systems, nodes and connectors. The nervous system, heart, blood, the veins in an eye, branching from the heart.
The artists aim to create an experience that has a positive, emotional impact on the audience. We believe that art (and libraries) can inspire change, through a very simple device - by showing someone that, to quote Neil Gaiman, “things can be different.” Knowledge of alternate possibilities is something that art can provide. Art can bring forth a conceptual knowledge, a kind of learning that involves feelings and mental states such as empathy. Through showing, rather than telling; sharing and making connections, we can inspire people to think in a new way, in an inspiring and in a provocative way. IDEATION in this sense is a positive protest, an attempt to change the way people really think about our world and their place in it.
IDEATION draws on imagery and sound from many aspects of human existence, from many different cultures and forms of human expression, from the natural and the built world. 25% of the imagery in this show is drawn from the State Library of Victoria. The journey follows a path from the galaxy in which we live; into the womb; sound waves, neutrons and synapses; birth, the sun, the moon, tree roots, mind and nature; biology; human anatomy, plant anatomy and plant networks; fractal and geometry; mathematics and astrology; writing, speech, language, books, songs, chants and community; art, complex networks, geography, weather, electricity, city networks; nebulas, stars, comets, and us.
Nick Azidis, Lisa Greenaway, Adem Jaffers