Try Not to Nod Off When I'm Cutting Around Your Ears is a collaboration between myself and experimental filmmaker / animator Tuia Cherici (manucinema).

The creation of the electroacoustic composition “Try Not To Nod Off When I’m Cutting Around Your Ears” involved a series of short, haphazard improv sessions laid on the operating table for an extensive array of digital splicing and processing. As a chain of causality emerged from the interactions between sonic elements, so did a cloud of potential meanings and associations that both gave rise to the title of the piece and provided an entry point for its visual components.

In her writing about her process, Tuia Cherci writes:

The questions guiding the video's creation:

In what ways can an image and its behavior relate synesthetically to a sound?

It may be a matter of colour, form, action, meaning, timing, texture, chance...

This is an experiment of combining all these layers of perception in an interpretation of the musical composition.

Realisation techniques are based on:

- Handmade stop-and live motion of organic and non organic items
- Handmade animation of the edited video

The first edited version was re-animated by projection on different surfaces, filmed through different lenses, and re-edited in accordance with the specific textures.

The process develops into a glance at a grotesque, post-human creature, the nature of its activity expressing the mysteries of birth and disruption of it's components.

“Try Not To…” premiered at DLECTRICITY Nuit Blanche Detroit 2014 at the Video Center Exhibition at the George R. N’Namdi gallery curated by Michaela Mosher. It also screened at “Infrared Ultrasound” – a screening at Detroit Contemporary that features work focusing on visual and sonic motion, gesture, and texture. It screened in 2015 at the Image Forum in Shibuya, Tokyo.