BAUHAUS FESTIVAL

SHORT FILM, FILM SCORE

As part of John Harle’s Bauhaus Festival 2022, I produced two projects engaging with the ideas and legacy of the Bauhaus School.

Barbican Impression No. 22 [4min 4sec]

Barbican Impression No. 22 was created in collaboration with Oscar Farrell. We engaged with the architecture of the Barbican Centre to produce a short film and accompanying music.

We wanted to explore new ways of expanding our creative processes, of incorporating artistic principles into laptop orientated workflows and techniques. Inspired by the architecture of the Barbican, we wrote a series of graphic scores that were recorded with the Bauhaus Band before re-composing them into a score for the film (see below).

The music we produced contains the Bauhaus Band recordings, as well as synthesizers, a drum machine and field recordings from around the Barbican Centre. We produced the short film using photographs taken exclusively around the Barbican Centre, drawing on Hans Richter’s ideas about ‘absolute film’.

Our main artistic points of focus were Wassily Kandinsky’s theory of colour oppositions (1911)¹and Joan Miro’s practice of surrealist automatism.²

Kandinsky’s theory informed the graphic scores, in which we applied different arrangements of colour and form to invoke an emotional response to the Barbican’s key architectural features. We applied Miro’s automatic technique to our re-composition and arrangement of the recorded material, allowing ourselves to alter the piece without our usual concerns for balanced structure and inclusion of popular music tropes.

Barbican Impression No. 22 was one of the pieces selected by John Harle to be shown at the Bauhaus Festival in Silk Street Music Hall on 20/05/2022.

¹ Kandinsky, Wassily. (1911). Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Munich: R. Piper & Co.

² Frey, John G. (1936). Miro and the Surrealists. Parnassus, 8 (5): 13-15.

Inflation [2min 53sec]

Inflation was created in collaboration with Nicola Perikhanyan. We rescored Hans Richter’s short film (1928) about financial unpredictability in the context of recent inflation in the UK. The soundtrack consists of sampled media coverage arranged into a semi-narrative form and an industrial techno score that at once responds to the gritty character of the film, the incessant progress of inflation and the harsh reality of living in the contemporary economy.

Collaborators:

John Harle, Oscar Farrell, Nicola Perikhanyan

Project Duration:

6 weeks

Date:

February-May 2022