Victory to Loss Ratio was originally the title we chose for the audio track played and recorded live in my studio by Alan B. Richmond Jr. and myself. Alan played guitar and loop-pedal, I did the rest: percussion, a snare drum, some dry leaves, etc...
I did the video some month after the audio piece was recorded. It was a kind of try, or further investigation into human perception, something about our desire to get image and sound in sync in our mind.
The sound and image layers of this work are by no means deliberately synced. The sound is what it is, a piece of music we played and recorded. The image level consists of single frames, entirely reproductions of paintings by Mark Tobey (US), an early abstract expressionist painter.
I was impressed by his works and his biography, his relation to music and sound in painting. He was a friend of John Cage, they wrote a lot of letters to each other, one of his paintings is titled Visual Music...
It’s around 150 different single images presented in the video, all paintings by Tobey - in different resolutions, I took everything I could find (and found appropriate) from online sources and books (scans) - but I didn’t try to represent these images in an appropriate way in respect to the original paintings, I turned a lot of these images to make them fit the 16:9 screen, zoomed in, cut edges...
The video consists of one repeating random sequence of these 150 images. It doesn’t appear to be a loop because the viewer tends to make ever changing connections between certain single frames and certain prominent sounds. But in order to break up the loop and confuse the sequence more I introduced a second layer of images, a very sparse selection of some of these around 150 images and spread them out randomly on top of the repeating sequence.
What happens for me when I watch it is that I start questioning my own perception, it makes me think about human perception in general and I can never be sure whether a certain sound makes me see a certain single image more clearly for a very short moment or if it’s the other way round, that maybe a certain image emphasizes certain parts of the sound - I guess it must be both, a kind of complex interrelation between sound and image, emphasizing each other.
What I also like about it is a kind of timeless feeling, sure the image layer could maybe be dated to roughly the 1950’s but it could also derive from a much later period - and the sound? - is it a very progressive piece from the 1960s or ‘70s or is it contemporary...?
It somehow deals with history, there’s something “retro” about it but it’s unsure where it’s elements are really coming from (given one wouldn’t have the information about Mark Tobey, and Alan and me playing the piece in 2013).