New York City TIMES

Being in control is not easy when you are a wannabe newyorker!

I was in AWESOME New York for the screening of Photosonic at NYC Independent Film Festival 2006 and, also, to perform at Stereo Club, Delancey and Libation (by the way the gig at Stereo was really crazy!)

[Eimear I love you!]

So I had the pleasure to meet producer/musician Keith Patchell (the picture of me is taken in his studio in the East side of Manhattan), eating pizza and having breakfast in Brooklyn, very close to my YMCA small room (Greenpoint area, what a cool area now)

Spent some great time at the Monkey Town with VJ/video artist Eric Dunlap, and meeting Artists Collective director Liz Lazarus (from Tokyo!) at the Delancey gig; we'll get back on that meeting for my upcoming partecipation at first AC Tokyo collective during summer in Tokyo, Japan.

I had even showed up at Westminister/Sperone Gallery for my video and meet Charles Moore of NBC, at NBC studios (still working on the Late Night stuff now)

PHOTOSONIC featured on number 11 of IFQ Magazine (Micheal Douglas on the cover!)
www.independentfilmquarterly.com




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Hi Joseph,

thanks for coming to see PHOTOSONIC at the New York Independent Film Festival, and thanks for the kind words!
I'll try to answer your question by explaining the symbolic language I had used in PHOTOSONIC, although you have to keep in mind that I had tried to be a medium of the Event ... this means that each element has created the language of PHOTOSONIC, and later on I had 'transcribed' the final result (as in music, by in reverse, first the recording after the transcription).
Here we go:


The starting point for the visual language of PHOTOSONIC was the book "ABC of Colour" by M. A. Ragge from the British School of Color (you can see the cover below)



As PHOTOSONIC is 'the product of an event', the ABC of Color has been part of the whole picture since the first moment.
In the opening of the book M. A. Ragger shows a 'color hexagon' to illustrate the 'harmonic language of colors', hues from Yellow to Blue - Violet. In the following pages the author underlines certain specific areas of the hexagon showing the points that generates Triads (primary and secondary colors), Families (yellow - magenta/red - blue/green and blue/violet, red/orange and green) and Color Harmonies (not less then 3, not more than 9 adjacent complementary colors)
The fascinating thing is that the same 'numerical and spacial' symbolic method used to map the 'colors harmony' can be used to show the Child - Adult - Artist triadic process of Born - Sleep - Awake followed by the PHOTOSONIC character in order to achieve Illumination.

Here I'll show in details what I mean:




Child starts with three white balls representing the three senses related to Memory (the third one is Brain), so that the big black strokes in the drawing are the senses related with the perception of the external environment (mainly connected with eyes, ears and skin), while the small black strokes are those three 'Memory senses'.
The white hexagon where the character is standing is (also) representing the harmony at the origin, the 'balance of the sixth senses', the harmony that gets broken when the character is generated and enters the 'sensible world' (as when a child is born).
In a way it can be seen as the 3 senses related to the perception of the environment are the 3 primary colors, while the 3 related to memory are the secondary ones.





Adult is the phase where the character awakes his sixth sense (and learns how to use correctly the 4th and 5th ones), by experiencing synesthesia.
Synesthesia is when we use two or more senses at the same time while perceiving an event or an information (hearing sounds while looking a drawing or having a flashback while tasting food are good examples); in PHOTOSONIC the source of synesthesia, both for the character and the viewer, is the 'photosonic guitar', a software/hardware music instrument that allows to 'translate notes into colors'.
The symbol shows how the 'awakening' senses related to Memory are connected with the stimulation that makes them awake (here the 'photosonic guitar'), this can be viewed in the frames before the 'switching vinyl scene'.





in Artist the opening scene shows the sculpture named 'The Wakening of the 6th Sense', (conceived during my permanence in Tokyo in 2005).
Like the 'Color Harmonies' symbol in the "ABC of Color" book, the sculpture shows the the result of achieving a complete awakening through the opening of a wound (as in philosophers Joe Bousquet and Gilles Deleuze).
The wound here is a physical injury represented by the cut located on the mouth area of the main character (that doesn't have a real human mouth before the awakening)
If we look at 'The Wakening of the 6th Sense' from the back/side view we see three elements: the Photosonic Guitar, the 'S' piercing and the main character with the 'mouth - injury'.
From the 'open cut' (or 'open mouth') a cascade of silver picks creates a 'pentagon - like' figure, the shape is not really the point, the goal is to show how the center (the 'S' piercing) is dominant and the rest is subordinate (as in the "ABC of Color' symbol for colors harmony).
During the last scene of the Adult Phase (the guitar solo scene), the main characters experienced full synesthesia while performing a musical climax; the Event makes the character 'the Son of the Event', now ready to generate the 'Artwork'.
The 'S' piercing lies on the center of the hexagon, it is the product of the wound, the injured mouth is no longer capable to hold it.

It means: "the way to achieve Illumination is always standing on the tip of our tongue, all living things can experience it by becoming conscious of their Wound" (as also in Zen philosophy)