SPECTRES OF THE NEW REALM Project Documentation Joseph Gilling Copyright © 2021 Joe Gilling Music. www.joegillingmusic.com Figure 1: Gilling, Joe. Spectres of the New Realm. Cover Art. Copyright © 2021 Joe Gilling Music. View online stereo version of the project here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf9LwSwbEpw 1 Table of Contents Synopsis ................................................................................................................... 3 Project Statement ................................................................................................... 4 Failures and the Virtual ......................................................................................... 7 The Haunting Voice .............................................................................................. 10 University of Brighton: 6.1 Project Setup ......................................................... 13 Equipment Used & Signal Processing .............................................................. 17 Mind Map ................................................................................................................ 18 Work-In-Progress Notes ...................................................................................... 19 Steinberg Cubase Project File ........................................................................... 20 Adobe Premiere Pro Project File ....................................................................... 21 Reading Notes ....................................................................................................... 22 Bibliography ........................................................................................................... 25 2 Synopsis Custom 6.1 surround sound array. Projected visuals. Spectres of the New Realm is an intense and immersive experience which combines sonified data, near-defunct audio/video, and saturated human voices. The work illuminates the hidden world of digital culture. Data mining. Bots. Fake news. Information overload. Documentation obsession. All-encompassing noise, crackle, bleeps, and voices fill the space. A means of reviving dead media. An awakening to the future. References to the project under alternative working titles may be found throughout this documentation. 3 Project Statement The glitch materialised out of silence, growing with exponential technological consumerism. However, it will always remind us of the imperfections of human endeavours.1 Spectres of the New Realm documents a state of modern living. Digital culture today is overwhelming and heavily saturated with information. The human brain was primitively not built for the vast cataloguing of digital data as it does now. The audio/visual piece reveals the hidden mechanics which mediate our everyday virtual interactions. It bombards the viewer with striking colours, shapes, and textures. The piece questions what the future means now, when we have effectively lost our ability to rationalise futurity though our fetishization of archaic aesthetics and total psychological immersion within the virtual. The work comments on a crisis of over-documentation, as mentioned by Simon Reynolds in his book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (2010). The exponential growth of the internet, since the turn of the century, has led to the intertwinement of past/present/future and real/virtual due to digitals total access. I ask what notions of progression look like now, when ‘futuristic’ concepts are typically ideas founded within documentation and media from the past. As I mention in my undergraduate dissertation Haunted by the Glitch (2021), “The internet has provided the ultimate archival space to reminisce and re-contextualise all sound materials, even those once seen as defective.” We now seem to spend more time looking back than we do looking forward. The sonic artefacts once seen as ‘by-products’ of recorded sound are now used by artists as the primary media for compositions. By personally using and organising these materials, and purposefully creating new ones, I critique and humour what it means to be modern now. I do not produce as a way of reviving the past with nostalgic romanticism, but more with concern as to where we go from here. Mark Fisher’s book Ghosts of My Life (2014) reiterates these eerie thoughts - haunted by futures which failed to happen. Artists such as Burial, whom Fisher also writes of, influenced the ways in which I produced this composition. I take sampled ethereal voices, mysterious dark drones, and sounds of corrupted technology to form a piece not necessarily about the future/present now, but a future which will always seem to be slightly out of reach. The project was created using a variety of sound sources which either intentionally contained ‘errors’ or happened to adhere to the glitch aesthetic due to the nature of their 1 Young, Rob (Ed.) Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music. Continuum, London. 2002. p.49. 4 existence. My main source of audio inspiration came from a glitch-producing technique whereby one runs digital files in playback formats which differ from the file types. For example, I converted images, software programmes, and text documents into raw data which could then be sonified using the freeware Audacity. Other sonic materials used included: hardware artefacts (such as vinyl crackle), damaged compact discs, white noise, computational hiss, and feedback. One of the concurrent themes throughout the piece is the use of sampled voices. I will not reveal the exact source of these in order to uphold personal artistic license, however choices were conceptually appropriate, often political, and essentially hauntological - morphing and reviving sounds and spirits, spectres if you like, from the captured past. Structurally, the piece is sporadic, harsh at times, beautiful at others, overwhelming, and often familiar in a strange techno-relational sense. Motifs emerge briefly before undergoing a process of complete destruction. Rhythms form out of recognisably atonal and typically non-melodic materials. The timbres created as a result of extreme layering and collaging, leaves audiences feeling overloaded with information and sensory stimuli. A feeling of optimism is proposed – perhaps with greater self-awareness we can change the destination ahead. The low-fidelity and muddy distortion throughout makes listeners pay close attention to what they are hearing as they attempt to comprehend the ghostly vocals and abstract tones approaching them. Visually, the work heavily distorts, corrupts, and manipulates found/sampled moving images. I was inspired by artists such as Max Cooper who often combines organic shapes and textures in a very digital way. Furthermore, the German musician and visual artist Carsten Nicolai, better known as Alva Noto, influenced my visual aesthetics with his harsh, glitchy, and fragmented creations - most recently re-released online for his 2018 album Unieqav. Spectres of the New Realm features pulsating, microbiological, and rich textural imagery. The intense viewing process develops around flickering colours and patterns, symbolic with RGB glitch art released around the turn of the millennium. Disturbing human-like forms appear throughout the piece, acting as a cultural zeitgeist figure, only just recognisable, after falling into and loosing oneself within the virtual. I experiment with foreground/background, collaging different sections together before breaking them down into the smallest of particles. Playing with synchronicity as well as asynchrony enhances the auditory experience by combining the power of 6.1 sound with visuals, accurately reflecting the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of the digital medium and subsequent glitch. When processing the images, I used a combination of in-the-box saturation and disintegration techniques as well as more unorthodox approaches. For example, I observed the results of using a hexadecimal code editor. This software allows a user to edit the binary data which 5 constitutes a digital file. By adjusting small sections of code, unusual and strange alterations are made to the playable file. Using a custom 6.1 surround sound array enabled me to spread sound to fill the room, immersing the audience within my constructed world and enhancing the unexpected through turbulent and disorderly speaker functionality. Voices move around and behind listeners, reiterating the ‘noise’ of information found online. I found myself inclined to characterise this typically unpleasant aesthetic due to the writings of James Bridle within his 2018 book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. Bridle argues that whilst we have the technological capabilities to collect and compile more and more data about life on earth, we know ever less about it. A dangerous fallacy is revealed - we both model our own minds on our understanding of computers and believe they can solve all of our problems. The idea that one can produce a machine with greater cognisance than its creators is hindered by a non-humanly ability to have access to all available knowledge. AI/AR/VR technologies will only increase human submersion into the virtual as they become more refined in years to come. As we continue to live in a digitalised post-truth era, the future begins to look ever more dystopian. However, Spectres of the New Realm does not leave an audience in a place of defeat in the wake of technological innovation. Hope is found within greater education and understanding of our reliance on the