Korsakow Essay

Life is a musical takes a multitude of seemingly disconnected clips of everyday mundane content and links them together through sounds. While the sound is not necessarily connected by rhythm or tone, the sound itself serves as the bridge between clips

Pattern
It seems as though the authors of this Korsakow work have gone through great effort to hide any semblance of a pattern. The description provided before launching in the video states: “Detailed, observed, close, mixed, fragmentary. Reworked to find and make rhythms. Elegant and well realised.” The authors were succesful in making the sequence seem disconnected, however there are a number of categories or apparent links which seem to be recurring themes. These themes are: artificial light, natural light, night, day, inside, outside, stillness, movement, and people. This pattern ensures that while the intention of the project is to provide a disjointed and abstract approach to the collection of sound bites, the audience is provided with various but consistent imagery and locations which form a familiar framework to comprehend the material within

Interface
The interface is a relatively bare-boned approach. The film starts with the main video screen in the center above 3 video thumbnails. This interface varies from clip to clip by switching the main frame from left, to right, to center middle, and back to center top. The interface does little more than show the audience the clip and the thumbnails, displaying still images of what one could expect to see or, more importantly in the case oft his work, hear.

Content
The content of this film is, as the description says, ‘fragmented, mixed and close’. The material presented is framed in many different ways, however, what remains constant (majority of the time anyway) is that the subject matter, whether it be cars on a highway or a close up of a traffic light button, the framing always shows the subject slightly off centre, or at least not always within the frame. This decision helps highlight the main subject of the entire project; the sound and rhythm. As the title suggests, the main subject or rather, content, of this piece is the sound and the way in which the sound connects to each clip. Some of the video content has been cut and looped in such a way that the one sound present becomes interesting and rhythmic, which it would not have been otherwise. For example there is clip of a door closing, this clip has been cut and looped at various points which make one sound become a rhythmically interesting piece of footage.
One example of a clip which is not explicitly fragmented or abstract is a clip of a hand stirring a cup of coffee. The entire cup is in screen positioned in the center. Obviously the important aspect of this clip is the sound, however, this particular. Lip seems inconsistent the other clips presented.

How well does it come together?
The overall impression of this project is a visually and aurally interesting product which emphasises the interesting and easily missable aspects of otherwise seemingly mundane subject matter. The interface is simple and inobtrusive which allows the visual content and matching audio to be our main point of focus. The pattern, while clearly abstract and arguably irrelevant. The linking class re never so different from each other that it becomes dis jointing and uncomfortable to watch. Very effective piece of work.