TRANSPORT_on the way

We are on the way, I am on the way. By plane to Rome, by train to Berlin, by car to Cottbus and by tram to the main station. Once a week from Dresden to Berlin and back, that is four hours each of driving time and lifetime, four hours, in which you look for employment, which usually distract from the fact of being on the road. But what happens when we focus on the fact of being on the move, assuming that we are on the way, on the move, without moving ourselves. What we are influenced by and what gives the feeling of moving or better to be moved. The landscape that floats past you when you look out of the window (in a documentary about the history of the cinema "Quo Vadis Cinema" it is said that the invention of the railways in the 19th century has contributed fundamentally to the people's perceptiveness to prepare for the running pictures in the cinema by getting the passing landscape conveyed in the train compartment and turning the compartment window into a projection screen, so to speak.), the light reflexes resulting from the rapid change of passing objects; Trees, houses, poles, walls, lighting poles, fences, train rails, people, animals, landscapes and other passing trains are burned onto the retina and also remembered in a matter of seconds (stroboscopic effect - the basis for using 24 25, 30, 50 frames per second at all as an image of reality can accept) and the change of proximity and width, of tunnel, station and wide landscape. Then, of course, the immediate change of the outside and inside, the interior of the train compartment with the other passengers, which one is indeed exposed in part and the view into the environment, which takes place next to the train tracks, but I have neglected for the time being.
There is also almost automatically a second aspect of this transport situation, namely the viewpoint of being confronted with a fact in which hundreds of thousands of people are on their way from one place to another to save their lives. Where the starting point is an unreal war situation and the destination in the broadest sense a yearning for pacification. Even in this case, the starting and ending locations are known, but the escape route is perceived as an existential phenomenon, which is largely decoupled.
One of the most motivating moments for this project was actually a stay in Chicago in 1995. I had an invitation to attend a performance conference at North Western University and had to drive down the subway from DownTown to the campus every day. As is well known to many, the subway in Chicago travels through an open tunnel system supported by support beams. These are the support beams that produce an impressive flicker of light in the low sun, ie in the morning and late afternoon, which has led me to record the irregular rhythm of the light reflections, depending on the speed of the subway and, of course, the spacing of the support units into a raster matrix. This became a visual composition, which I then evaluated instrumentally and with a sound software. This was basically my first acoustic experience report in the thematic context of "being on the road" and the immediate description of this process.
One is really more often on the road and exposed to this described transport fact. How do we deal with it and what is our state of consciousness in relation to this assigned exceptional situation? After all, we are actually on the way from a starting point to a destination and the transport between these places usually becomes a more or less redundant transitional situation. And exactly this redundancy of the situation provoked me. What if we face the transitional situation and make it a theme and develop a creative path for re-experiencing, so that the time window of this one transport situation can be completely different, for example, to places where we are traveling at a completely different speed. That's what bothered me and I've explored different ways that allow me to describe and realize exactly that.

Currently I am working with an audiovisual parallel recording of views from the train window. Here, the image section is recorded in a 4K resolution, transmitted to a Max MSP programming and acoustically evaluated. Relevant for the sound analysis are color value and contrast analysis. So I get each transmitted video recording an evaluated sync tone.

In postproduction, the video image is then abstracted via various effect generators so that only the basic information I want to work with remains, namely the fact of movement in the immediately fast time window. Almost the same, but only in a different acoustic relationship do I then develop with the sound sequences, which originally originate only from a noise modulation and then are stylized in the post-processing into a spatially, multi-dimensional event.
The aim of this project development is an interactive room installation in which the visitors can trigger this installation and interact with it. One form of interaction could be the simple activation of the video and sound projection, or an advanced form in which visitors can influence the dynamics of the installation through their intensity of movement.
The design of the installation is a multiple projection for the visualization, which consists of a beamer arrangement of three projectors, which act as a high-resolution split screen. Thus, a video transmission is realized across all three beamer, which is developed in an extreme broadband format and consists of a continuous image information. I would like to start from a room situation, which transmits on three wall surfaces, a synchronized video projection on two opposite wall surfaces and on a front wall, in which the visitors are. Of course, the immersive perception situation increases decisively, because the viewer is again in a comparable interior situation and is in a transport unit that has an environment. The three-sided projections would then each consist of three projector units, which will project in split-screen format.
Of course, the same should be developed with sound as well, because acoustical perception is also supposed to convey a spatial dimension which makes the visitor's own movement the theme and locates the sound spatially differently. For this purpose, at least four audio channels and two subwoofers should be available, which can be controlled separately. In this way it becomes possible to develop an extended sound space in which the sound sequences can also be transported through the room and the audience can also experience different sound perceptions in different positions of the installation.
Due to the parallel projection mapping of image and sound sequences, the new location also becomes a dimension extension and every visitor is enabled to experience and recapitulate the topic relation in a very subjective way.

Currently I'm working on a programming that makes it possible to transfer the video sequences (comparable to the sound sequences) in a three-dimensional image information. Here, the tonal and color information is read from the video images and transferred into the surface structure of a fractal, creating a three-dimensional wireframe structure, which I then want to mix with the original image. Trial versions of this form of image analysis have already been developed and need to be specified, so that a real-time transmission is possible.


Jo Siamon Salich
Dresden, January 2018