Tours en l’air (2020)
Single channel HD video, stereo.
Digitized abstract from painting, tooled digital objects, animation, sound.
I produced a large digital “source” abstract for this piece from Ghirlandaio's The Marriage of the Virgin (1479), published in the public domain by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I then sampled the abstract into a series of 1920 x 1080 pixel panels. These are presented in non-repeating series like tones in twelve-tone serial musical composition – prime (forwards), retrograde (backwards), inversion (inverted forwards), retrograde inversion (inverted backwards). One "sees" the entire abstract across time, presented as an ordered series of fragments. The fragment panels repeatedly perform tours en l'air (turns in the air), each turn pausing in a balletic pose.