Flickering spheres and pulsating waves snake their way through the darkness as Andy Stott performs live. Joëlle is the brains behind those hypnotic landscapes after being commissioned by MIRA Festival to create a unique visual performance for Stott’s first live show in Barcelona since releasing “Faith in Strangers”. The show’s concept is loosely formed around feelings of despair and the sense of a broken world. Representing the view of earth in a distorted and deformed way which is still beautiful, we have today the exclusive clip of the self-taught artist’s complicated but impressive process. “There are themes of insignificance and fragility” explains Joëlle, ” ..and an element of things breaking down and building up again. But there is also an element of hope, transformation and faith in humanity.”
Concept
“I was commissioned by MIRA Festival to create a unique visual performance for Andy Stott’s first live show in Barcelona since releasing “Faith in Strangers”. I was excited to be paired up with Andy as I hear a melancholy in his music which was completely aligned with my state of mind. The show concept is loosely formed around feelings of despair and the sense of a broken world. I wanted to represent the view of earth in a distorted and deformed way which was still beautiful. There are themes of insignificance and fragility and an element of things breaking down and building up again. But there is also an element of hope, transformation and faith in humanity.”
Software & Tools
“I used After Effects with my favourite Trapcode plugins to create a lot of the distorted planet earth and further added layers to the rendered clips in real time using Quartz Composer. Some of the content is purely generative and made with Quartz Composer, and all of the content can be manipulated “on the fly” in real time. Not only is this a very fun approach to performing visuals but it also gave me flexibility to improvise and adjust them according to what Andy played, as I had no set list or any idea of what Andy was going to play as it was all unreleased / live material.”
“I performed the visuals using 2V-P and Lemur for iPad. MIDI controls in 2V-P are mapped to sliders in Lemur using a MIDI connection. Using Lemur allowed me to design my own interface and customise the controller to my exact needs. 2V-P is a super simple and minimal performance app that focuses on content creation rather than typical VJ effects.”
“How It Was” is taken from the album “Faith In Strangers” © + ℗ Modern Love by Andy Stott
