My proposal for the 2023 Australian Environments on Screen and MINA mobile film commission was to create a film that investigates presence and absence within the Australian landscape, through the use of Light, Shadow, and Minimalist Electronic Music Composition.

I think about silence frequently. It creates a space in between events, creating perspective and often distance. When it comes to the landscape, I find it hard to experience a silence unless it’s during the nighttime. It’s the lack of light that provides a visual silence for me. I find silence a valuable tool when it comes to audio composition. When I started to work with it at first it felt incredibly anxiety inducing, but once I became more comfortable with silence, I found my sense of temporal presence had increased, as well as my listening skills.

Visually speaking, I have felt dislocated from the landscape for quite some time. Early in my artistic career I worked with a large amount of photographic visual content, but as my concepts and working methodologies evolved, I found that my tools became more minimal. My engagement with the visual landscape reduced, and I lost some interest in the visual world.

I wanted to re-examine my connection to landscape, and explore place as an environment punctuated by visual detail, in the same way that I use sounds to punctuate silence. I was curious as to if this process would develop similar feelings of physical presence and connection for me, as working with silence in audio has done.

The technology used in the creative process I found rather freeing. The lightness of a smartphone enabled greater maneuverability in terms of moving shots, and was an interesting tool to utilise in a process of engaged experimentation. I explored a variety of locations in different conditions, and different lighting setups.

The initial tests made apparent the different quality of video, and lens distortion inherent in the footage. This was a new aesthetic to engage with, but when combined with my audio composition created an interesting tension, and further audio-visual conversations together.

After two final shoots, several edits were trialed in order to experiment, explore, and understand my feelings towards the landscape, and my conceptual undertakings for this project. The editing process felt easier once the composition was finalized, however conceptually the project had evolved further through the the inherent characteristics of the visual footage, and the filmed subject matter.

Traditionally I’d suggest that a landscape can create a sense of knowing the location, and yet within my film, no clear depiction of geographic location exists. Only a collection of details emerge, however these are connected with a clear and structured sound composition. Emotionally I wanted to explore a sense of being able to know and engage with a location only through specific details, in order to create a feeling of the emotional context within which we experience a place through.

This project enabled me to further refine my working methodologies to question uses for visual silence, and to question what it means to be visually and physically present within an environment. Rather than offer solutions, these questions are leading to future projects, along with how smartphone video can be further incorporated into my practice.

My proposal for the 2023 Australian Environments on Screen and MINA mobile film commission was to create a film that investigates presence and absence within the Australian landscape, through the use of Light, Shadow, and Minimalist Electronic Music Composition.

I think about silence frequently. It creates a space in between events, creating perspective and often distance. When it comes to the landscape, I find it hard to experience a silence unless it’s during the nighttime. It’s the lack of light that provides a visual silence for me. I find silence a valuable tool when it comes to audio composition. When I started to work with it at first it felt incredibly anxiety inducing, but once I became more comfortable with silence, I found my sense of temporal presence had increased, as well as my listening skills.

Visually speaking, I have felt dislocated from the landscape for quite some time. Early in my artistic career I worked with a large amount of photographic visual content, but as my concepts and working methodologies evolved, I found that my tools became more minimal. My engagement with the visual landscape reduced, and I lost some interest in the visual world.

I wanted to re-examine my connection to landscape, and explore place as an environment punctuated by visual detail, in the same way that I use sounds to punctuate silence. I was curious as to if this process would develop similar feelings of physical presence and connection for me, as working with silence in audio has done.

The technology used in the creative process I found rather freeing. The lightness of a smartphone enabled greater maneuverability in terms of moving shots, and was an interesting tool to utilise in a process of engaged experimentation. I explored a variety of locations in different conditions, and different lighting setups.

The initial tests made apparent the different quality of video, and lens distortion inherent in the footage. This was a new aesthetic to engage with, but when combined with my audio composition created an interesting tension, and further audio-visual conversations together.

After two final shoots, several edits were trialed in order to experiment, explore, and understand my feelings towards the landscape, and my conceptual undertakings for this project. The editing process felt easier once the composition was finalized, however conceptually the project had evolved further through the the inherent characteristics of the visual footage, and the filmed subject matter.

Traditionally I’d suggest that a landscape can create a sense of knowing the location, and yet within my film, no clear depiction of geographic location exists. Only a collection of details emerge, however these are connected with a clear and structured sound composition. Emotionally I wanted to explore a sense of being able to know and engage with a location only through specific details, in order to create a feeling of the emotional context within which we experience a place through.

This project enabled me to further refine my working methodologies to question uses for visual silence, and to question what it means to be visually and physically present within an environment. Rather than offer solutions, these questions are leading to future projects, along with how smartphone video can be further incorporated into my practice.