Alyson Marshall

Digital Animation
2014

As data is manipulated and processed the image changes, tiny increments sequentially applied to them make the still moments move again. Calmness. And then, chaos; a strange dissonance of things happening, people doing things. Though it seems to regain some sense of calm, the chaos resonates, and it loops over and over like an unwanted thought, mesmerising yet in some way unsettling in the circumstance it has been placed. It flickers through these moments, distorting them to be barely recognisable in comparison to the originals, subjective experience overpowering the actual reality of the moment. The use of data manipulation in digital images acts as a metaphor for the way experience is perceived through mental ‘filters’.

The original installation of this animation, accompanied with the discordant sound of white noise, aimed to evoke the feeling of being trapped in a chaotic and almost distressing headspace, dissonance created through the sonification of an image’s data and visual stimuli created by audio manipulation. The space itself is dark and foreboding, enclosed so that the outside world feels distant despite being so close.

Special thanks to photographer Lucy Lamb for supplying the photographs used to create this piece.