//assembly is a 3 minute projection for the town hall in Jyväskylä, Finland, produced as part of the 2025 Mapsion festival.
Working through the process of assembly, the various components of the program were created – stems for audio, building outlines and mattes – realtime facade renderings of the building surface, and these elements were first assembled as audio bed, and then (without excessive intervention) as a composited timeline.
This collection of “rushes” that are considered for an edit speaks to the process of linear editing, which dominated my practice for many years. What differs in this instance is that the sound is edited first, and the work is collated according not only to temporal sequencing (the timeline) but spatial arrangements of layers and elements which occupy the “frame” of the work. In this sense, the influence of spatial montage, (including dimensional elements that layer into the frame) that emerges from optical film printing, but has rapidly accelerated since the development of digital compositing tools, is intrinsic to the mode of assembly of the work.
Elements edited into the space of the projection assume relationships determined by spatial montage, where the physical space of the building becomes the larger organizing principle.
Starting with audio likewise renders the finished work less “pictorial” and tilts toward an affective reading of the piece – where the integration of sound, image and built form may create a sense of an altered place, without appealing to the image as a a figurative device, and relying on the surface as a “proto cinematic” display.