Re: [microsound] infinite jest submission

[craquemat <craque@xxxxxxxxxx>]

These descriptions are great! I love that John picked the Untitled one, 
I had an inkling to do one of those.

But I was attracted to the surrealism in the description of "Baby 
Pictures of Famous Dictators" and almost immediately had an image of 
what the film would be like.

Not having read this novel yet (I still await delivery from Amazon), the 
source of my inspiration was the description itself.

I took 45 minutes as my guiding point and imagined the film was a 
tableau, a "moving still life" of sorts. It's a 45 minute long game, a 
slow motion still life of a disaster reflected in the childsplay of 
fooling around with physics.

We see a setting that never changes, of innocent children (we assume the 
same as in the pictures referenced by the title) against a backdrop that 
is ever changing, sharing an appetite for control. They become the 
embodiment of the Famous Dictators, playing games, like children, with 
adult toys of power and war.

A chemical emergency could imply this is related to nuclear power or 
physics. Are the children playing a game that caused the emergency? Are 
they blissfully unaware? Or are they working to solve the problem by a 
series of complex nuclear games? It's unclear if we will ever know.

The soundtrack is not a reflection of the action seen onscreen, but 
rather the literal voice of each proper name. As their structures 
compost, weaving as they play the game, new forms are illuminated.

These nine names were used to drive various parameters specific to each 
person's voice, guiding things like frequency, filters, delay effects 
and envelope (in each case, the longest, most familiar version of the 
English proper name was used):

	Adolf Hitler
	Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin
	Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini
	Mao Zedong
	Ho Chi Minh
	Francisco Franco Bahamonde
	Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
	Saddam Hussein
	Tojo Hideki

The analysis of the text file containing the names was done with perl, 
which wrote out various ChucK files. The entire piece is one large ChucK 
session recorded to a file, then normalized.

When I started the piece was a lot less "bright" than it ultimately 
became, but in a strange way I feel like it took on its own character, 
and mourns both the tragedy of these dictators and the loss of DFW.

-matt


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