ROAD is an immersive non-linear screen work which uses first person footage of a roadtrip across the American south west – through deserts and canyons, coast and cities all filmed on a handheld Panasonic GH4 in 4k – and sets this within a site-specific soundscape.
ROAD is an extract of 20 minutes from 32 hours of raw footage taken over 5 states. It is endlessly looped; a never-ending road. The project uses ‘chromarithm’, a new algorithm which maps and interprets the visual data from codec streams to drive the midi – literally enabling us to hear the landscapes shifting in front of us. This is looped onto the original soundtrack – man and machine in harmony moving forwards.
It is a collaboration between film artist and technologist Nick Driftwood, composer Kevin Matthews and creative producer Donna Close.
“The result is something effortless and intuitive, a sense of being in some athletic ‘zone’ where self and world are one. This is the fabled freedom of the road that car companies promised us but could never quite deliver.”
– New Scientist