The bridge

NOTE: Please read the prior post in order for this one to make sense.

Attention to our involuntary (and pseudo-voluntary) biological signals continues to strongly influence my art, however, it's unlikely that I will continue to use biofeedback. And whereas Follow Your Heart! is an immersive, interactive installation experience designed for one individual at a time, I do not expect the research and artwork development I'm now undertaking to result in any of these attributes.

I am uncertain at this stage whether I would need to develop specialized hardware for the image capture and digital projection of variable frame rate video. But even if this does become the case, then at least the content I create in this specialized medium could be viewed by many people at once. This future potential for shared experience and greater audience exposure is something I'm enthusiastic about.

As in Follow Your Heart!, the research going into my new work is based on my fascination with the relationship one has to their unconscious. Encouraging disorientation of a person's normal sense of self and facilitating transcendental experience is still my ultimate goal. The concept from Buddhist philosophy of anatta, possibly translated as non-selfhood, is something I want my work to explore.

In Follow Your Heart!, the unconscious self plays the leader for the conscious will to follow. If some degree of tension or resentment is momentarily provoked as the participant struggles to keep up, all the better. Resonance or dissonance between the video's frame rate and the viewer's dominant brain waves may create a meta-drama on top of the film's narrative content. If the pull of the film on the viewer's conscious mind is out of step with the direction and rate of frame rate entrainment, it is unlikely that the range of feelings Follow Your Heart! aimed to elicit would emerge in this gap. Rather, a simple awareness of the disparity might emerge and the conscious mind would self-correct.

Music is often used to reinforce the emotion of a scene. Combining visual entrainment and cinema would likely be used in the same mutually reinforcing way. For example, very high frame rate could be employed when a character is afraid, trying to think quickly, avert disaster and has an epiphany. Very low frame rate could be used when a character is basking in a state of happy relief, dreaming or drunk.

Much less often, but occasionally to intensely powerful effect, music can be very carefully chosen in deliberate emotional dissonance with a scene (e.g. triumphant music set to a massacre, sad music bringing tears of happiness). Low frame rate accompanying a sudden, sorrowful revelation and lots of on-screen action might work in a similar way, to underscore the hopelessness of a character's efforts, like in a dream when running but being held back by the air.

Then there is the special case of interference patterns that may be generated between frame capture rate and periodic on-screen events cycling against still reference objects: This would be a wholly unsubtle (but, I am inclined to imagine, beautiful) way of illustrating how the quality of perception is reflected on what is being perceived. A statement that sounds obvious, but is conveniently forgotten so often.

Working toward implementation and experimentation is certainly preferable to merely writing about a permanently hypothetical cinematic vocabulary for the proposed technique of frame rate variance. But I suggest the possibilities I have imagined here to give the reader a sense of the potential significance I hope may eventually emerge from the latent idea.