Pixels, simple rules and emergence to show us something important about our world. “Gated Thoughts” is Max Cooper’s latest release and forms part of the Lattice 002 VA compilation, released on Mesh alongside music from Pleizel and Machína.
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Warning: Contains flashing images
Max Cooper:
Thanks for having a look at my latest music video collaboration, this time with the coder/artist/musician Jazer Giles, who makes a lot of cellular automata style simulations, where pixels interact on screen following pixel interaction rules to create emergent outcomes.
I love these because they can show us something important about our world.
When we find simple rules that create forms we recognise from everyday life we can start to see how our world as well can be built from simple rules and emergence. And I love the idea that we can glimpse refined versions of the foundations of nature, and alternative possibilities for natural form outside of our world.
So that’s a very general comment on why I love Jazer’s work; on to this video specifically:
I was working on a piece of music built on gating, with a very digital blocky vibe, and Jazer had shown me his latest visual system of gating and branching, so we had a nice marriage of music and visual to work with. The “Gated Thoughts” title refers to the link to our brains, with their branching networks and synapses as gates, similar to what Jazer’s system shows.
But his system isn’t a brain, it’s all emergent form from simple rules, he codes the system and plugs in the starting conditions and we get a unique and new visual output each time. The “gating” word here is referring to something which stops a signal under particular conditions - musically the lead synth has loudness variation and loudness gating removing hits on its own accord to make a rhythm, and visually the gating is stopping pixel flows in space according to Jazer’s algo which I hope he’ll explain in some more detail for us. So yeah, I think that’s it here on the description of what was done, now we can focus on the more important part of how it actually feels to bathe inside (headphones or good stereo field recommended for the binaural elements to have full effect). Thanks for having a look/listen.
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Video artist: Jazer Giles
For this video, Max and I wanted to subvert some of the (beloved) tropes of AV (lots of super tight cuts, fast paced and highly synchronized video elements) and let people spend time with slowly evolving, but highly detailed, scenes that continuously unfold into new colors and shapes. The video transports the viewer from the level of a few pixels, out to all 8,294,400. The underlying algorithm works by comparing the gradient of nearby pixels and merging pixels where the gradient points in the same direction. This gives rise to local maxima, which in turn creates a stronger gradient to pull pixels towards it, creating cascading synaptic branching patterns and networks of connected pixels.
This is my third collaboration with Max, and it’s always a delight. He really understands the iterative design process and contributes a great deal to the refinement and vision of the work. Looking forward to the next collaboration.
CREDITS
Concept/Composition/Production: Max Cooper maxcoopermax @maxcoopermax
Video: Jazer Giles jazergiles @jazergiles
Additional Mixing: Aneek Thapar aneek_thapar
Mastering: Chris McCormack at Blacklisted
Music: “Gated Thoughts” - Max Cooper
℗ 2024 Mesh © 2024 Manners McDade / Faber Music Publishing Limited
Mastered by Chris McCormack at Blacklisted Mastering
Record label: Mesh meshmeshmesh.net + meshmeshmesh_
Management: The Wild Seeds www.thewildseeds.com + the_wild_seeds
All video & audio copyright is owned by Max Cooper and Mesh - no use without permission.