01:28 – Video Art with Sound Collage

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.
(To such heights of evil are men driven by religion.)
Lucretius, DE RERUM NATURA

‘Religion’ is based on a language text corpus containing about 140,000 words. With Cycling74’s Max/Msp/Jitter, I created a virtual canvas for my video that is covered with random text from the corpus. This canvas was then used to mask a clip of animation that I’ve prepared for that purpose, allowing only text to appear where pixels in the original animation were moving. My goal was to give the entire clip random text textures that are aesthetic, recognizable yet unreadable.

In ‘Religion’ there is no synopsis, there is only escapism, the text, the subtext, both are moving too fast, they cannot be read, nor can they be understood by anyone. Religions are a threat to our society. Religion is deterministic. No gray areas. No sense of humor. Religion is to escape, to hide, to run. You can scream, you can shout, but there is no real escape, no reality without being. Like a fly on the wall, you can just be.