Commission from Festival in de Branding for a multimedia work for the ASKO ensemble OCT 2003

SUBLIMINAL will use video and sound combined to explore levels of subliminal awareness of information both visual and aural . It will be a play of split-second perception and hidden counterpoint that draws material from both the advertising world and government sponsored psychological research from the fifties onwards.
Two screens will be used to create an abstraction and illusion of stereo imaging that is commonly used in perception tests. Varying asychronisation of sound and image will be prevelant as a means of exploring the relation of the ear to the eye.
On a compositional level what interest me is the shifts of perception from fleeting detail which is ‘dishonestly’ amplified visually on the projector to underlying layers of slowly changing and barely perceptible hidden counterpoint. The play of shifting awareness between micro and macro structures.
In this way the form of the piece will work in the gray-area between over-stimulation of sensory perception (short and fast changing information) and sensory deprivation (slow rate of change of information) – layers which shift and change to reveal hidden counterpoint.
The sound will be made up of both a soundtrack synchronised to the image and computer processing of the live ensemble sound which distorts the character and time-scale of the acoustic sound.
The length of the piece will be about 30’