Project #1: Brainstorm

I am an avid music listener. Although I consume plenty on the internet via streaming services, I also maintain a radio both in my studio and at home, which I use frequently. Being from Chicago, a city with a strong radio culture, I have always been fascinated by the static that comes from tuning between AM/FM radio stations. The random noises that emerge from these transitions feels like a beautiful accident, adding a layer of unpredictability when I am listening to the radio throughout my day. I also watch a lot of old concert recordings on YouTube, especially those filmed on VHS of my favorite 90s bands. The natural degradation of VHS tapes create fuzzy visuals and muffled sound quality. This evokes a sense of nostalgia, as though the passage of time has made the memory of the performance even more visceral.

For this project, I want to explore these ideas of decay and corruption through glitches related to radio static and recordings of live musical performances. Of the labs we have worked through so far, I am most interested in using Audacity to distort digital images. I find it fascinating how I can corrupt a visual file using a program designed for audio, blurring the line between sound and image. I plan to mainly use screenshots and stills from my personal archive of concert videos, focusing on the imperfections that give them warmth and character. My goal is to create a series of glitch images and audio files that reflect my love of live music culture, while embracing the chaos and beauty that come from the decay inherent to these out-dated technologies. By layering these images with various glitch techniques, I hope to create a distorted, dreamlike quality that resonates with the feeling of being fully immersed in a live musical experience.