Transducing

That’s such a fascinating way to start, with a tool that’s meant to clean up photos, but instead, you pushed it toward chaos and abstraction- taking something practical and turning it into a creative process that completely transforms what you’re looking at. When you began exporting and re-editing those images repeatedly, did you immediately sense you were onto something, and did it feel like you were uncovering something hidden within them?

[Laughs] No, at first it looked terrible. It’s weird, after doing this for many pieces, I realize it’s sort of like chiseling a large piece of rock in darkness and at some point in the iterations the lights turn on and you get to see something tangible and interesting. If you turn on the lights too early, it’s really not good visually or just looks like typical glitch art. There was one work where I made about 500 iterations, nothing interesting emerged for a while. I had no idea if anything was going to happen, but eventually something did.

That’s wild you’re doing this all in Lightroom. Lightroom is not meant to be able to create new images, it’s just meant to organize and fine tune photographs.  Do you have any thoughts on how the final works emerged?

I actually thought about that a lot and I really think it’s from three things: The data structure of the source material, the methods of how I used Lightroom, and finally, the not so obvious one, the algorithmic processes that Lightroom uses to drive its tools. And the secret sauce is how you edit it each time, you really want to make sure you don’t get white or black clipping, maybe only at the end, but if you do it too early, you essentially lose all texture and it becomes a solid color. Clipping is when parts of an image get so bright they turn pure white or so dark they turn pure black. You can’t get this information back. I would sometimes edit 20 versions of the same starting image and they would differ and branch into different images after a certain number of iterations occurred. But they would also retain similarities as well if you looked close enough.

There’s something almost obsessive about that process, but it also feels deeply experimental, like you’re trying to see how far you can push something until something comes together. Can you tell me about some of the works that came out of this process?

One piece I did is called Nine Minutes of Life. It’s a combination of three different sounds: the sound of people having sex, the sound of someone delivering a baby, and the sound of someone peacefully dying in their sleep.

I wanted to capture the sounds of life, life at its most transitional moments- conception, birth, death, into a single piece. Each recording is 9 minutes long.

Another piece I did was a self-portrait made from the sound of my DNA. I took my entire DNA sequence and using programming I converted it into sound, then did my iterative editing process in Lightroom. I also worked on music, audiobooks, photographs, audio from movies/TV, sound of a black hole, and a lot of other sources.

I have to ask, what does your DNA sound like?

At first it sounded pretty harsh. But I realized that all I had to do was slow it down and it sounded like a heartbeat. I was really shocked when I realized that the sound of my DNA sounded like a heartbeat. That was purely coincidental, but one of those really exciting random things that makes art worthwhile for me. I think that if you don’t shock yourself with your art, then you aren’t pushing hard enough on creativity and to me creativity is really just exploring the unknown.

I like that, creativity is all about embracing the unknown. Let’s move to the series title, Transducing . What does it mean to you?

In a literal sense, transducing is a word that means converting one form of energy, signal, or information into another. These works take sound and turn it into images, or data into sound, and then again into images, through countless editing steps. Even after all that, the original source material is still embedded in there somewhere, it’s just scrambled. If you knew every step, you could actually reverse engineer most of these works back into their original sound, image, or data. Like it’s actually possible that you could recreate my DNA sequence, or at least portions of it just from looking at my self portraits.

I see it as a metaphor for the universe. A place of noise where we as humans continue to try to decipher and figure out it all means. Whenever we find underlying order, we realize that the signal was always there all along, we just didn’t know how to see it for what it was. You see, everything that could ever be discovered is right in front of us. It’s just waiting for our perception to catch up.