Could I Sleep
HD Video , 6 minutes, colour, 2019
Commissioned by the Holophon Audio Arts group and the Saskatchewan Filmpool, this project allowed me to create an interpretation of the six minute 2010 sound art piece "Could I Sleep" by Anna Pidgorna. This premiered at the "Sight on Sound" event at the Cathedral Village Festival in Regina in May 2019.
Suggested by the title of Pidgorna's work, I considered the notion of sleeplessness and the shifting in and out of dreams. The fragments of sound reminded me of listening to the radio on mornings when consciousness is particularly difficult to achieve and I find myself moving between dreams and reality, making up my own reality based in part on fragments of talk radio playing in the room. However, rather than a bedroom, aspects of Pidgorna’s construction feel more like a journey, a late-night drive when the car radio, the motion, and the dreams merge. The images I presented begin in a seemingly normal car with a suggestion that the sound is coming from the radio. However, the driver would frequently alter the controls on the radio (I used a very cool car lent to me by Steve Karch which as plenty of dials and so on). Zooming in and out from the radio, the view of the outside the car would change each time it is revealed with images ranging from distant places to non-representational animated colour patterns.
It was very important to me that I create something new (not a didactic representation of the audio) but at the same to to respect the audio and build upon it without altering what I felt were its intentions. I hope it worked.