Innermost (2019-21 DOWNIE + NATASHA BARRETT)

Innermost is a new visual / audio installation in collaboration with Natasha Barrett. This work's stereoscopic imagery and high-order ambisonic sound composition crafts new mechanisms of sound / image relationship out of dense and joyous field recordings of public gatherings in Oslo. This material, absent of protest, political rally or the threat of violence, yet amassing the free expression of individuals forms the basis of a magical synthesis of experience, paradoxically transporting the audience to the everyday.

Visually, Innermost reorients contemporary advances in AI’s digestion of moving images away from the barbarisms of surveillance capitalism and its incessant drive towards identification, quantification and categorization, choosing instead to exploit these emerging technologies to magnify and celebrate the rich detail of pedestrian motion, space, sound and interaction. In this piece we create and deploy these new digital visual strategies to draw form and movement in previously unseen ways while harking back to the early days of hand-drawn experimental animation.

Musically, 3-D audio capture and spatial-audio source separation allows the complete sound-field to be addressed as a compositional subject within which Innermost's themes are reflected in the way that people's individuality emerge in the gait of the sound.

Innermost’s celebration and articulation of the body in public space and its refusal to succumb to, and reconstitute the terrors embedded in, the technological confrontations of the street, takes on new resonances in this era of political protest and viral contagion.