BecomingChristian Marclay

Who is he?Christian Marclay is known mainly for his visual art and his music composing. His work is very interesting as it explores the connection between different elements of art. He uses a mixture of photography, videography and sound. He is also well known for his gramophone records and turntable sound collages. For over twenty years Marclay has been creating works that explore the intersection of the aural and the visual, reflecting on the narrative of how sound and image are related.

ProjectsMarclay created many pieces of art that explored a variety of different mediums. His early works include a piece that was made of reassembled vinyl record that he then used on his turntables. His interest in music composing has lead him to making the pieces of work that interested me more. When researching into his style of working a few of his pieces struck out to me. The few that I was interested in the most were Video quartet, The Clock, and telephones. Video quartet is an audiovisual piece of film. It is a collage of Hollywood film clips that feature actors and musicians playing instruments. The piece of film is presented in four screens

placed adjacent to each other. The overlapping of the piece creates a unique audio. The clock is also a piece of film synchronised to the local time zone, at any moment, the viewer can look at the work and use it to tell the time. Yet the audience watching The Clock experiences a vast range of narratives, settings and moods within the space of a few minutes, astly, Telephones is a seven and a half minute film, again using the smell clips from Hollywood films that create the narrative of actors and actresses dialing, picking up and hanging up the phone.

Group BriefWho is Christian Marclay?

Research and IdeasAs a group we were given a brief to create a presentation to show the way Christian Marclay works. As a group we began the brief by all researching in depth one of his more interesting pieces. The three we decided to take influence from were; Video quartet, Telephones and The clock, as he used clips from movies to compose a short film. Once we decided on the way in which we will present the piece we had to think of a concept. As the brief was to create a piece reflecting the person we were given we decided to make the concept “Who is Christian Marclay?’ We decided as a group that our fnal outcome was going to be a comical piece by

collecting clips from films where people are laughing. We gradually built up the narrative by asking Who Christian Marclay is, and the idea is that no one knows if the actors are laughing at him, or laughing at the fact that people do not know who he is. Putting this piece together made us realise that Marclay’s films must take a long time to compose, as finding particular clips that flow together was a really hard part of our project.

Final OutcomeOur short clip was one minute long but it is composed of about 40 individual clips put together. I feel that we could improve our video by making a stronger narrative or a more developed narrative. However I think that the length of our clip was neither too short nor too long as the laughter could get irratating for the viewer if it carried on any longer.After making this piece I started to put together a few ideas for my individual final piece. I will be sticking to the audio visual part of his work as it’s the part we have researched into.

Initial IdeaParadise

Idea DevelopmentAs Christian Marclays work reflect a high interest in mixing music I decided that for my final piece my main inspiration would be the audio. I have decided to pick a well-known current song that has been remade by many public members and reposted onto youtube. Paradise by Coldplay has many cover versions that I will be using in my final piece, some of which have been made by people at home, some more professional versions. There is also variation in instruments that have been used in the different cover versions. Taking influence from Video Quartet, this piece will be presented across more than one screen. The initial idea is for the

song to be played across the screens with different parts of the song playing on the screens at different times to compose the song. The visual part of the final outcome will reflect on the audio part as they both link together. There are two ways I could present my final outcome. Firstly it would be the idea that I have meantioned with playing the videos across three screens. Or I could compose the video on one screen with the visual parts seperated and appearing at different times in reflecting different layouts.

Final Piece

Final PieceMy artifact reflects Christian Marclays way of producing audiovisual films as I have combined the two features together to create my final piece. I have used premiere to compose the song and rendered different parts of the video as separate clips and played them across the screens to recreate a more interesting representation of the song. My initial idea was to play it on one screen but have separate sections for the different parts.

EvaluationI feel that my final piece works well as the song still fits together, however I could have made it more interesting by separating the screens into maybe different instruments playing on separate screens. Or, I could have been a bit more adventurous by overlapping the sounds more like Christian Marclays- Video Quartet piece. I found that some parts of the song did not run smoothly like other parts but the idea that the versions were different was reflected through this variation. Another way in which I could make this piece more interesting and more aesthetically pleasing is by adding connecting visual elements. For

Evaluation

example I could have the words for some parts of the song across the screens alongside the people singing or playing the instruments. The idea could also be expanded into more than three screens. The presentation of the screens could be made to look more proffesional by having the screens in front of a white background or black background.