Night Suite is a series of photo-collaged visual scores developed for a performance by the new music repertoire group, Southland Ensemble. All of the imagery was remixed from my ongoing Valhalla Nocturnes project, which uses physical camera screenshots to explore the prismatic and abject relationship of our bodies to the digital worlds of video games. Influenced as much by Cornelius Cardew’s exceedingly cryptic Treatise (a massive musical score written in an idiosyncratic visual design) as by the physicality of the light cast by the video games’ VFX gyrations, these works start as traces of the undercurrents of the formal language of the long-exposure photographs of the screen. Elements are excised from the images and, a bit like a sampler, the resulting fragments were then reassembled into individual score-artworks charting a dream-soundtrack of night’s journey through the the never-ending strife of these dark digital dream worlds. Valhalla Nocturne continues my deep interest in finding new ways to make visible the underlying forces that shape the way our hobbies, fandoms, and leisure obsessions interface with media-saturated world in which we live.
