Storm footage and photography by Kelly Delay
Video directed and edited by Jennifer Tividad
Max Cooper:
Thanks for coming back to have a look at this latest audio-visual collaboration. It started when I discovered the amazing work of the storm chaser Kelly Delay, and we had a bit of a chat about doing a music video together.
The idea seeded my Earth EP where I delved into various earthbound growth processes, microbiological/spike, ice formation/reflect, population growth/swarm and storm systems this time, with surge.
Then Jennifer Tividad (who has worked on Emergence, and Chromos in the past) agreed to work with Kellys stock video and stills, much of it never seen before on Kellys pages, to create this beautiful storm surge story, from windy field recording beginnings to violent nature at it finest. Big thanks to Kelly and Jennifer, and hope you enjoy it too.
Jennifer Tividad:
Earlier this year Max introduced Kelly Delay, a Texas-based multi-media artist
«This music and video project came from a collaboration with a mathematical artist who works under the name Cornus Ammonis. He creates simulations of pattern formation, using ideas originally created by Alan Turing in his attempts to explain and model the mathematics of living systems. These systems create beautiful warping interacting layers of simulated substances, and we thought this visual effect could lend itself well to an imagined alien planetary surface with some unknown form of geological process — molten landscapes.
Its a slowly evolving hypnotic visual process, so the music has the same form, with a repetitive syncopated two note motif playing under a gradually developing chord structure which becomes ever more layered. Its all about atmosphere and sitting back to let it wash over I think, its not a sharply defined piece, and it needs to be given some time to develop, but hopefully the result is worth the time you give it.
After Cornus Ammonis had created a load of stock video sequences using his models, I then passed the footage on to Morgan Beringer (who created the awesome Unbounded video from Emergence). Morgan applied his trademark processing style to the previously raw footage in order to blend and layer, and make the whole visual have a lot more smooth movement and rich organic feel. Sorry thats not a very technical description of what he did, but hopefully youll know what I mean when you see it!»
— — — — — Cornus Ammonis:
«Two systems are at work here. The first simulates a grid of points connected to their neighbors by nonlinear springs—that is, springs that break (exert much less force) once they extend past a certain point. Each point has both a position and velocity, which is updated by summing spring forces and applying reverse advection. The collective action of the spring system produces constantly-shifting hills and valleys of points that become oriented in nearly the same direction. Straddling these valleys are groups of springs that have „fractured“ in opposite directions, in a process similar to the forces governing the patterns that form in the cracked earth of a dry riverbed.
The second system is a simulation that rides along the „surface“ of the spring grid. This system produces Turing pattern-like stripes and blobs that split and merge as they propagate across the underlying spring system vector field, yielding an overall effect analogous to seafoam on an ocean wave. Like a fluid simulation, this system propagates quantities over a vector field, but no divergence minimization or advection process is used—the process is mediated only by the interplay of diffusion and various quantities computed on the vector field, namely, curl (vorticity), divergence, and the average distance between neighboring vectors. The equations governing the interactions between these quantities were chosen so that the system remains constantly in a state of flux, rather than settling into a stable configuration—they were not chosen so that the system models some specific physical process.
The output of these two systems is a vector field. In order to turn this vector field into a terrain, a solver integrates over the field to produce a height at every point (i.e. a heightmap). It is not possible to perfectly recover a heightmap from these systems, so the output of the solver is a continually-updated approximation. The terrain is rendered using raymarching, so that the entire process, from simulation to rendering, is computed entirely on the GPU.»
Max Cooper:
For the «Yearning for the Infinite» project I looked for different ways of visualising the infinite, interspersed between imagery of humans in endless pursuit. For one chapter I wanted to visualise the digits of a transcendental number, thought to be endless and non-repeating. Martin Krzywinski specialises in visualising these digits amongst many other things, and one of my favourite images is his tree map of pi, which presents this endless nested chaos in beautiful visual form. I wanted to map that growing randomness and chaotic detailed structural form to the piece of music, so I collaborated with the great music software developer, Alexander Randon on a special tool which allows the construction of musical fractals and many other complex melodic forms. With this tool I started the piece with a simple melodic structure, which is iteratively broken down into more and more complex melodies as the tree map breaks down the initially simple first digit into more and more complex sub-structures. With the aesthetic as a whole becoming this sea of interacting notes, partly random, but with a global form emerging eventually, as the circle is embodied by the chaos of the digits of pi.
Nick Cobby collaborated with Martin to bring this idea to life in animated form for the visual show, with a hyper-detailed tree map structure growing all around the audience. And if youre interested in the ideas behind this I delved into this chapter in some detail in a recent blog essay here (which also comes as a poster with Martins tree map image inside the album vinyl package): maxcooper.net/transcendental-tree-map
Martin Krzywinski:
The transcendental tree map encodes the first 20,244 digits of Pi = 3.1415...7012.
The construction of the map begins with dividing the canvas with 3 vertical lines, which forms 4 rectangles. Each of the four rectangles formed by this process is divided with 1, 4, 1 and 5 horizontal lines, respectively. This forms 2 5 2 6 = 15 rectangles. Each of the 15 rectangles is divided by vertical lines according to the next 15 digits of Pi. This process repeats until we have performed the loop 7 times.
The division of each rectangle is not even—the positions of the lines are slightly jittered. This gives the map a more organic feel.
The number of digits encoded in each loop is 1, 4, 15, 98, 548, 2,962 and 17,180. In total, 17,180 vertical and 3,064 horizontal lines are drawn and these form the backbone of the map.
The video is created by layering numerous animations of the construction of the map, in which the rate and order of line growth is varied. Blinking rectangles indicate that the lines for a digit have completed drawing.
Original tree map and animation clips by Martin Krzywinski.
Compositing, coloring, synchronization and other post-processing by Nick Cobby.
Nick Cobby:
The challenge with Transcendental Tree Map was to bring to life Martin Krzywinskis amazing scientific visualisations of Pi. They are so dense and complex, that a considered approach was needed to ensure the computer systems could handle all the information and still maintain clarity. We had a twofold approach, using automated coded sequences from Martin and then manual digital manipulation and editing from me. Using both a generative and manual approach parallels the juxtaposition of order and randomness inherent in Martins work, and the hypnotic music Max created.
Although all Martins sequence outcomes are different, they all start with the principle rule of Pi, and when placed on top of each other, they all occupy the same grid space allowing layering and using some of the sequences as alpha channels to reveal others underneath. At any one time there are up to 30 sequences running at once. At times I wanted it to look more organic, with line tracers drawing like roots of a tree, or holes appearing in the data then glitching back to its organised structure, like its constantly battling itself. When the visual is at its peak, the construction and destruction of the order of the tree map is constant, and the notion of the infinity is revealed through the endless visual possibilities.
The transcendental tree map was originally created for 2015 Pi Day (http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/pi/piday2015/posters.mhtml) by Martin Krzywinski (http://mkweb.bcsgc.ca) (@MKrzywinski), who has been creating Pi Day art (http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/pi/piday.mhtml) since 2013. Martin is a staff scientist at Michael Smiths Genome Sciences Centre at BC Cancer (http://www.bcgsc.ca) where he works on data visualization.
Filmed at the debut Yearning for the Infinite show at the Barbican in London on 28 September. Warning: this video contains flashing images!
Max Cooper:
«It was exciting to build this show for the Barbican. It’s one of my favourite venues in the world and they encouraged me to go big. So I turned the whole space into a multi layered canvas and set out to audio visualise the infinite. I collaborated with many visual artists and academics, each chapter using a different form of infinite visual structure on which I also based the music as a score. The result was an intense live show, somewhere between classical, techno, theatre and cinema. We couldn’t capture the true 3D effect of the semi transparent screen layers on film, but Tegid [Cartwright, the director] has done a great job showing the vibe of the evening, which was pretty special. Big thanks again to the Barbican, all of the visual and musical collaborators and team who helped put it all together, and everyone who came along to make it what it was.»
The new album project is full of scores to infinite visualisations, so it needed some spacey synth noodlings to match. Its the first time Ive made a live improvised piece of music, it gives it a different feel, less precise arrangement, constant patch morphing and more flow. Something to get lost in hopefully. Myself on synths, Six Sigma on bassline, and Adam Betts on drums. I added some detailing later and the big retro snare etc, but the core synth and basslines that run throughout came from that initial jam session.
The track is called Parting Ways, and is set to a video sequence by the awesome Maxime Causeret, telling the story of creation via endless division. Youll see the references to old video projects in there too, it was one part of the new story which overlapped with some old ones.
— — — MAXIME CAUSERET:
Ive tried to start from a very simple element a box and make it split again and again in order to create more complex structures. It ends up to the universe splitting into multiverses that loops back to this box splitting and splitting again, in an infinite loop. As a funny fact, I often get crazy scales while zooming out, with a few unexpected bugs like min and max slope values in Houdini animation editor. I hope you will enjoy this animation. I have to thanks 2 collaborators that helps me on this project: Leslie Murard and Gratien Vernier.
1. Max Cooper — Sea of Sound (Traum)
2. Au Revoir Simone — Take Me As I Am — Max Cooper Remix
3. Max Cooper — River of Gold (Traum)
4. Echaskech — The Storm — Max Cooper Remix (Just Music)
5. Abe Duque
Origins is part of my new Emergence audiovisual show. It examines how everything comes from (almost) nothing — how simple laws create complex, fascinating and beautiful outcomes. Origins shows how electromagnetism — one of the four fundamental forces, helps create the types of cell structures that allow life to emerge.
What you see is water mixed with an oily ferrofluid. Because their charge properties are different, they cannot mix – each repels the other. But when forcibly mixed by mechanical or magnetic forces, the result is that spheres form of one fluid inside the other – basic cell-like structures. All living cells today exhibit this same natural property of being encased in molecules that form a barrier which repels water, and it’s possible that the first cells arose through the sorts of processes shown in the video.
The inclusion of a magnetically influenced ferrofluid isn’t needed to yield these basic cell-like spheres, but provides a great way of manipulating the fluids for the video. And it looks cool.
Origins is one chapter of the Emergence story for which I have worked with many different animators, musicians and some mathematicians to put together a full length audio and visual live performance. Each part of the story involved an interpretation of the ideas so that we could present them in a beautiful and abstracted, but still meaningful manner. I didn’t want to start from the big bang as would be the usual, but to look at more fundamental form from which everything could stem from — the structure of numbers themselves, shown via Riemann’s zeta function, the Sieve of Eratosthenes and Sacks spiral. The story then progresses through ideas of dimensionality, eventually the formation of matter and the universe, stars, planets, the beginnings of life, evolution, plants, animals, humans and all the way through to modern society, the capitalist machine and information era.
I wasn’t sure how to approach the origins of life section, and originally was asking for an evolutionary-themed competing cells video. But when I saw the first tests of Rabbit Hole’s ferrofluid work I realised that we were looking at something much more fundamental – how natural materials and forces can produce the first sorts of structures needed to initiate early life.
Director Tim Dee of Rabbit Hole adds:
Most of the footage you see is rotated 180 degrees to make the movement more striking. We experimented with several liquids to try to create dramatic movement: from a ferrous liquid made from vegetable oil, water and printer tone (which didnt work so well), to using kerosene, oleic acid and magnetised iron filings — all in a tiny tank the size of a coffee mug, with about four different magnets and an airpipe used to manipulate the liquid.
The video was filmed using a Blackmagic 4K Production camera with Nikon prime lenses to get in close. The final picture stitches up to three pieces of footage together, with all camera movement and zoom added during editing. This was our first music video, though weve worked with Max on his website and record covers before. Hope you like it!
There is also a brand new site dedicated to providing you with some new, unheard, music, mixes and remixes that wont be available from anywhere else, all for free. If youd like to receive this music you can sign up to the site at www.maxcooper.net/downloads
skeler. — N i g h t D r i v e スケラー is a mix by skeler of unreleased tracks.
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Tracklist:
0:00 Skeler — ID
2:39 Devilish Trio — Nose To The Grindstone (Skeler Remix)
5:45 Skeler — ID
7:35 Skeler — ID
9:40 DaniLeigh — No Limits (Skeler Remix)
11:50 Skeler — ID
13:00 Skeler — ID
14:46 Skeler — ID
17:17 Skeler — ID
19:50 Skeler — ID
22:25 Skeler — ID
24:15 Skeler — ID
25:45 LEA RUE — I Cant Say No (Skeler Remix)
28:14 Skeler — ID
30:38 Skeler — ID
34:05 Skeler — ID
36:37 Rihanna — Umbrella (Skeler Remix) (Ember Island Cover)
39:50 Skeler — Blue Foundation — Eyes On Fire (Skeler Remix)
43:08 Skeler — ID
47:50 Skeler — ID
51:06 Skeler — ID
52:56 Skeler — ID
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Support/Follow Skeler:
Bc — skelermusic.bandcamp.com
Fb — www.facebook.com/skelermusic/
Sc — soundcloud.com/skelermusic
Twitter — twitter.com/skelermusic
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Video By utitoyo: www.youtube.com/user/utitoyo
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