The Films of Clarence Barlow

Uccelli Ungheresi (“Hungarian birds” in Italian) is a three-part video film, which is the third and final part of the composition Fruitti d’Amore for cello and electronics, written in 1988 for Frances-Marie Uitti. In this film, three “stanzas” are formally followed each time by a “refrain,” itself showing a repeated dual structural division fractally extending downwards to levels of single pulses. In essence, the visual material relates to human greed.

Written in 1998 for the pianist Kristi Becker, this was originally a piano piece comprising a 12-second prelude (a sonic translation of the words クリスティベッカロ [ku-ri-su-ti bek-ka-ro], (“Kristi Becker” in Japanese Katakana script), followed by a chaconne in which a photograph of Ms. Becker’s face is graphically reconstructable by laying all ten 16-second cycles on top of each other. The three words forming the title are Bengali for “twenty cotton strands unemployed,” an allusion to a layer of the compositional technique. Shortly after completing the music, I made a film displaying the compositional process, which after all had had the visual as its origin.

To celebrate 100 years of film, the sound track of this film (“Study No.7” in Spanish) was commissioned in 1995 by the Kunsthalle (the state-run Art Hall) in Bonn, Germany, to accompany Oskar Fischinger’s 1930 film Study No.6. One layer of the music paraphrases Study No.6 by Conlon Nancarrow, whose esthetically unproblematic technical brilliance resembles that of Fischinger. The other layer is a metamorphosis of Fischinger’s dancing objects, effecting a “physiophonetic” correspondence between the objects’ shapes and the resulting tone-cloud’s sound color. In 2015, rights-related friction with people in the Fischinger Foundation led me to completely replace the video track with one of my own making, while still referring to Fischinger’s objects.

Written for a showing of Raj Dhawan’s collection of Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) paintings, this piece is based on the music of Mucha’s friend and Moravian compatriot Leoš Janáček (1854-1928). 37 selected Mucha paintings are matched by excerpts of 37 Janáček pieces, many of them movements of larger works. Each painting’s size dictates the length of the music selection. A sharp movie clapperboard crack precedes each section. At first the music is limited in range to a minor seventh (as in my 2010 piece vinte e cinco anéis – the tuning and instrumentation is identical), which gradually expands to four octaves. Each Mucha work is shown first only with its most widespread color, the rest in grey. During the run of each Janáček music, the colors expand in range, starting at the image center and moving outwards as a widening three-dimensional aperture (see the title), to finally include all original colors.

Evanescent Evidence, a video film of duration 4’16” made in July 2021, is entirely based on 60 random videos downloaded from the internet in 2000, their durations ranging from 7 seconds to 4 minutes. That year I began to use a PC and to use the internet on a regular basis. The videos are in 320 x 240 pixel format; a quarter of them are in stereo, the rest in two-channel mono. Every pixel in every frame derives from the corresponding frame of a film randomly chosen from the 60:at the start about 1/60th of the pixels derive from one or other of the 60 films. The audio track accompanying each frame is taken from a random 8 of the 60 soundtracks. But as the shorter films come to an end one by one, dark blue pixels and silence are inserted as placeholders. As a result, the number of downloaded pixels and samples in this video gradually decreases with time. They vanish completely at the end, hence the title.

From 11/23/99 to 2/11/00, I physically went westwards around the Earth within a belt 30° wide, north of a great circle passing near Cologne, Germany (where the trip started and ended) and Wellington, New Zealand. Every day at the same stellar time (a stellar day is 23h 56m), I made a digital audio and video recording. In 2001, the sound material was edited and assembled to form a 41-minute piece reflecting the above rounding. In 2015, this audio piece formed the soundtrack for a film made by editing and assembling the video material. The title refers to crossing the x-axis of a graph of a sound wave, as well as the Greenwich Meridian, the Equator, the Dateline, and midnight between 1999 and 2000 (experienced twice, in New Caledonia, and again in Tahiti).