Harlequin (2020)
Two channel HD video, stereo.
Digital abstract from archive painting, animation, sampled sound, synthesized music.
For Harlequin, I first produced a large digital abstract derived from Davide Ghirlandaio’s The Marriage of the Virgin (ca.1479), a work made available in the public domain by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I then extracted a number of HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) stills from this abstract, putting them in random order for sequential visual display. The black and white left panel plays my random samples according to the rules of 12-tone musical composition — prime, retrograde, inverted, inverted retrograde, odds, evens, etc. The rhythmic, color right panel, a kind of video/music object, follows a similar display scheme. The viewer is presented with the total abstract composition in samples, rather than in a complete video canvas.