Max Cooper A Sense Of Getting CloserWatch at the source

“I have a sense of getting closer to something which my life depends on. I can sense it but I cannot tell if I should be excited or terrified about what will happen”

It has a clear felt form which I wanted to convey, the feeling of apprehension and excitement, something which I wanted to slowly introduce and tease in a long build format. It became one of the most directly transcribed quotes I think, in terms of the feeling of the music, and one of my favourite parts of the creation process. I felt an extreme connection to the music and idea during writing, and pushed that feeling as hard as I could.

The visual project needed something special, and I was lucky to have the opportunity to work with Conner Griffith. We spoke about the process of us moving towards new states as a result of our daily inputs, and in particular, those of advertising and social media pressures. Conner came up with a beautiful way of presenting a study of historic and current material in both a spatial and temporal manner, constructing flowing structures and stretched out through time - It has become one of my favourite parts of the new 3DAV live shows.

This is also the final video project from On Being, but the database of quotes is still active, and will continue to feature in my performances and installations. So if you want to add your own thoughts to the project please do. Many thanks and big love to all of you who got involved with this and made it such an emotional and connecting process to be involved with.

My initial focus for this project was to explore the design languages of print media in advertisement through collage and abstraction. I had been watching my mailbox fill with catalogs I didn't order and coupons I would never use, and I saw the potential in this collection of what was effectively trash/recycling for most people, as a cultural archive. I thought that if I amassed enough of this media, some patterns would start to emerge, and hopefully a story of humanity, seen through the products of our capitalist system.

I extended a similar approach to the world of screens, abstracting TV ads and social media activity by presenting time as a dimension, to offer a glimpse of the effect these mediums have on us in the aggregate. With each of these collage experiments, what became clear is that the abstractions can be quite beautiful when we remove or obscure the content and context. I became fascinated with the dichotomy of this weighted, socially and economically charged imagery, and the simple beauty of these light shows that would emerge through the technique. I think it captures the existential nature of it all quite well; a hypnotic light show we can't look away from, yet we know is made up of low-quality content fed to us by engagement algorithms.

The quote Max provided resonates with me because of its uncertainty. I often oscillate between excitement and terror - it’s not clear to me that this moment we face isn't a necessary stage of transformation, complete with its own growing pains. These media systems are not going away anytime soon, and how we choose to engage with them will shape how we move forward as a society. I'm hopeful for a kind of collective media literacy upgrade, one that will have us looking back to a time when we were subject to technological systems we created but didn't understand, and looking forward to something new, something more conscious.