Author: Tim Anderson
School/Directorate/Research Institute: Humanities
Abstract: In the creation of Tim Anderson’s performance piece Mother, Baby, Life,(1) sounds, images and video were carefully harvested from the media and digitally subverted to parody themselves and to provide caricatures. This is permitted by the government’s handy Exceptions to Copyright regulations (2). The sources of the clips were diverse: popular music samples, exploitative websites, Freeview television, action movies, and on-line catalogues.
Additional material was created from serendipitous street video and children’s toys. Live elements were introduced for performance: two brief narrations plus several outbursts of my collaborator, Guillaume Dujat’s digitally-based percussion and electronica. Tracing our journeys from birth to death, the piece looks at childhood, media exposure, deference, rage and violence, individual and state sponsored. Each topic lasts a minute.
By examining two of these segments, the digital processes involved can be seen and demonstrated.
The first one, Baby, draws from René Magritte’s 1958 the Golden Legend where a sky full of golden baguettes is viewed through a window. My sky is made of doting mothers, providing a background for their babies to drift past. A sound sample, Freddie Mercury starting Bohemian Rhapsody, is stretched out of recognition before other melodic drones, built on samples from the Spice Girls, Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis, take over. Real sound, edited from a live recording in a Rochester haberdashery completes the segment.
The eighth segment, War, colours a still photograph of a mountainous landscape with cut-outs of tanks and fighter planes selected from online catalogues of children’s playthings. The images are digitally animated and trundle or zoom across the scene accompanied by heavy gunfire and artillery sampled by Dujat from computer games and played live on electronic pads using the video as a diegetic score.
The majority of the digital tools (mis)used are easily available and require little specialist knowledge.
1. https://youtu.be/eG2K47j5mgc
1. https://youtu.be/eG2K47j5mgc
2. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright#fair-dealing
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