I made this video this past winter from footage shot last summer in Hong Kong. It’s about shipping set to two amazing pieces by Estonian minimalist composer Arvo Pärt. The music starts after a 5 seconds of silent visuals, the video is 20 minutes long. This is a very low resolution version.
Pärt says a couple of amazing things about his musical technique called Tintinnabulation.
“Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers - in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises - and everything that is unimportant falls away. Tintinnabulation is like this. . . . The three notes of a triad are like bells. And that is why I call it tintinnabulation.
“Tintinnabuli is the mathematically exact connection from one line to another…..tintinnabuli is the rule where the melody and the accompaniment [accompanying voice]…is one. One plus one, it is one - it is not two. This is the secret of this technique.”
‘No image can replace the intuition of duration, but many different orders of things, may — by the convergence of their action — direct the consciousness to that precise point where a certain intuition is to be seized. By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, we shall prevent any one of them from usurping the place of the intuition it is intending to invoke.’
(Bergson, from Intro. to Metaphysics as quoted in an online TateModern forum of liquid architecture in 2006 at http://www.tate.org.uk/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=4453&start=15&tstart=0)
…make something which experiences, reacts to its environment, changes, is nonstable…
…make something indeterminate, that always looks different, the shape of which cannot be predicted precisely…
…make something that cannot “perform” without the assistance of its environment…
…make something sensitive to light and temperature changes, that is subject to air currents and depends, in its functioning, on the forces of gravity…
…make something the spectator handles, an object to be played with and thus animated…
…make something that lives in time and makes the “spectator” experience time…
…articulate something natural…
The environmental writer of the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert, wrote a disturbing article of the state of the oceans. Victoria Fabry, an oceanographer at California State University at San Marcos has been studying Pteropods which are zooplankton, a form of snail, also called “butterflies” of the ocean. The ocean absorbs about half of our carbon emissions, causing acidification threatening shell calcification….(See entire article.)
It is of a Masaru Emoto videotaping of ice crystals forming whilst being played Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.
You can see how exuberantly the ice crystals are responding to the music!
Emoto has written a number of books on this phenomenon, showing the response of water, as it starts freezing and forming crystals, to beautiful sounds or visuals.
Water has changed its manner of crystal formation with kind or mean words/intentions. At the same time, an entire lake was cleansed…
Interesting to contemplate, believe what you will.
