In Deep of Night My World Unknown
Violins, Cello, Low Strings, Oboe, Electric Guitars, Synthetic Sounds.
· My World Unknown ·
As much a disclosure and invitation as an expression of my experience.
· The World Unknown ·
A way of describing something outside myself rather than within.
This second piece of music can also be heard as a back-drop for the first.
Like the image below, at first unseen, it is full with enigmatic and indeterminate forms.
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The art above is fantastical, gothic, and dreamlike. Perhaps to some it may also be unsettling as it plays with the shapes of mysterious spirits, magical trees, and fabled half-seen creatures.
The deep of night can seem foreboding, uncertain, and full with unfamiliar thoughts and images. A feeling of ambivalence often permeates my wakeful nights. The first piece of music acts as a counterweight with its clear melodic lines that suggest the image above, in common with my experience, is perhaps more complex than troubling.
For me, the second piece together with its associated image below is more unsettling than the more expressive, tuneful declarations of the first. I present it here as it stands for all those things I feel as in some way beyond me, that are troubling, often unseen, and perhaps out of my control: those things that wake me in the deep of night. By subsuming the music 'In Deep of Night The World Unknown' into 'In Deep of Night My World Unknown', I not only symbolically take possession of the unknown, but begin to shape it. I become no longer anxious of a darkened time, but begin to welcome it.
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I am someone who prefers to investigate rather than turn away. I find it difficult to ignore the unknown, especially the mysterious.
As soon as I express my world with light, sound, and ideas, my world has the potential to be known, and in this moment of your reading I make a small part of it known to you.
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Art is a means of moving experience, feelings, and ideas from one mind to another. As with everything that moves where and when life is concerned, change is ever present. Life as a human is not digital, it is analogue, as is experiencing art.
With a digital exchange it is possible to copy identically, so something in one place can be similar to another in every detail and without the tiniest difference, whereas analogue describes something continuously varying. All living things on earth have been analogue by nature, but with the emergence of artificial consciousness this is set to change.
Being analogue, humans experience the same things differently.
As I look at the pictures on this page my view and thoughts of them are constantly changing, even though the images are completely still. With music my experience is richer as the nature of music is that it changes from one moment to the next and exists only during the passage of time. There is no still music as there can be a still image. Silence, the closest aural equivalent to stillness, requires a duration of time to exist.
Many humans use the digital realm to pass something from one place to another. We do so using many different means: computers, smart phones, pads, and devices. How the digital enters our experience changes our perception of it because of our being analogue.
The art, music, and words I have created that you see, hear, and think about were all created in the digital realm. Despite this, the digital signals that enter our worlds through different chains of material objects (monitors, speakers, cables, headphones etc.), our varied physical senses, the time we choose to listen, gaze, and read, and our differing views of what is beautiful and ugly, result in a singular, unique experience.
I talk about these things as the artwork's title, and our understanding of the medium in which art is exchanged, becomes part of the subtext that informs the artwork in its entirety: all the light, sound, and ideas you find here at this moment in time.
I could have named the work 'In Deep of Night My World Remains Unknown', but that is no longer true the moment I express, record, and share it. 'In Deep of Night My World Unknown' makes known. Art takes what would otherwise be a solitary experience and transforms it through its various mediums of light, sound, and ideas, so that it becomes a shared experience.
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What is known and unknown is of never ending interest to the curious animal, and the most curious of all is that which is known and unknown about our inner lives. The image, music and words here seek to express my feelings and thoughts about what it is to wake in the deep of my night, and the great enigma and rush of experience that characterise that quiet waking.
'In Deep of Night My World Unknown' breaks the cycle of silent thought that often defines my night. Making brings a little of what I feel and think out into the open, and once something is in the open, it is easier to ponder on, easier to pick up so to speak, and turn it around in one's hands to look at from various points of view. By sharing these things I also invite others not just to consider my world, my deep of night, but more importantly, their own, your own.
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'In Deep of Night The World Unknown' is followed by a Monochromatic version of 'In Deep of Night My World Unknown'. Monochromatic colors are all the colors (tones, tints and shades) of a single hue.
