For my final project, I decided that I should go back to something I generally have a bit better luck in working with. And by that I mostly mean audio, because for the video component, I opted to make use of Adobe After Effects, which I have not worked on for a couple years now. Nevertheless, the effect achieved is very close to what I was after, though there are parts that still bother me about it. Mostly nit-picky things about how I feel it builds up, and issues with how it ends, and how I wish I'd made the audio piece longer so that maybe that would give a push for more video texturing.
Anyway, in this video which takes forever to render, I explored why we, who are so obsessed with multimedia and multitasking, so very rarely will combine those two with themselves - sure people will watch TV and do other things at the same time, and picture-in-picture was a step in the right direction - but what happens if we try to create multi-multimedia? At what point could it be all just noise, or nothing at all? I felt like this was rather allegorical to our hypersaturated media centric society, and the disorienting effect of the increasing texture of the video only further played into that allegory.
The video was an elaborate bricolage of sources, containing my own work and the work of my fellow actlabbies', as well as various other internet sources, like Twigger's Holiday and It's Jerrytime!. The audio was originally much more subtle in its execution, I swore I wasn't going to layer as heavily as I normally find myself doing. And in the initial mix of the audio, I did well to keep myself in check. However, later, while combining it with the video, happy accidents started to occur that I could not ignore, and that is that I accidentally started looping the audio in at later points in the work. I could have quite easily gone and cut this out, but I decided to take it and roll with it because I liked the way it was going. The end result is what is contained in the video streaming above, and I am pretty pleased with the dynamic of it. The audio contains samples from The Refused's "New Noise", Jonathan Richman's "I Eat With Gusto, Damn, You Bet!", The Stranglers' "Golden Brown", The Mountain Goats both "The Irony Engine" and "Commandante", The Plot to Blow Up The Eiffel Tower's "Johnny, You're All Grown Up", Lifter Puller's "Math is Money", Form of Rocket's "Loving Her Was Easy", and Les Savy Fav's "Blackouts On Thursdays", though that is just a very long, slow pick scrape that pans left to right over the "Loving Her Was Easy/Commandante" juxtaposition.