Pixel Opera, 2024
Reclaiming the glitch!
Back in the 90’s, glitch and interference were a normal part of working with live video in performance and installation. Computer and internet speeds were painfully slow, hard drives and memory had minimal space, and wireless did not exist. As a creator Gabrielle chose to embrace the interference and low resolution, rather than fight it. Error, disturbance, and glitch became part of Gabrielle’s aesthetic, and has informed her work ever since. She has always found beauty in the space where something is breaking down, and fascination in digital artifacts and their relationship to the original source material.
Created in TouchDesigner with original video footage of a quiet flowing stream in the forest….
Music is Microstoria/Init Ding (don’t have permission to use this music but it is one of my favorite albums of 1995)
Surface/Displace, 2024
Gabrielle‘s recent work in TouchDesigner explores the relationship of audio and visual material. Working with audio reactive compositions, where the soundtrack creates the movement and motion in the video, she continues along the theme of digital interference. This process allows her simulate the interplay of natural and computer generated movement.
In this series, using video captured in the cenotes of the Yucatán, Mexico, elegant lines generated from the audio dance on the surface of the water, distorting and displacing the image.
modulations, 2023
Gabrielle started using TouchDesigner, a node based visual programming tool, as way to create methods of real-time video manipulation and express the visual language she has been developing since the 90’s. Working in TouchDesigner has enabled her to generate audio reactive visualizations, by setting up precise conditions and flows to transform video footage.
All of these videos start with source material from nature, shots of water reflections, flowing streams, passing landscapes, or breaking waves playing on loop. She then feeds this footage through a series so digital transformations that use audio triggers to distort, disturb and displace the image, sometimes rendering it unrecognizable. After setting up a precise set of parameters, these videos are self-generating, and play and evolve continuously.
2023-24
Water features prominently in Gabrielle’s work. The surface of water, the motion of water, the sound of water, the reflections on water.
Gabrielle started using TouchDesigner, a node based visual programming tool, as way to create methods of real-time video manipulation and express the visual language she has been developing since the 90’s. Working in Touchdesigner has enabled her to generate audio reactive visualizations, by setting up precise conditions and flows to transform video footage.
In this collections of pieces, Gabrielle uses audio to trigger the interface of a collage of videos channels, exploring how to interfere the flow of water with sound. Lines trace the movement, to connect and create tension in the flow.
2020-2023
These videos are part of a series of compositions created from fragments and loops of old Hi-8 video footage. Gabrielle has always documented what she see with a video camera, shooting out of trains, buses and taxi windows in moments of transition. The camera is a passenger, passively observing, while at the same time actively moving through space with dynamic motion and speed.
She has always been drawn to what is what is outside of the frame, not the main action, or what lies in the spaces in between, where people are not looking. This series is a resurrection of places that have we passed, unnoticed or forgotten as we move through life. The creation of pieces investigates of how we re-frame and re-animate our memories in the context of the present. The errors and disturbance in these works is a metaphor for the malfunction of memory.
2020-21
VERTICAL SCROLL deals with the monotony and hypnotic quality of scrolling through social media feeds, and how ultimately the action is an endless loop with no beginning or end, nor any action besides "reaction” in hitting a “like” button. The effect of watching this video is deliberately made to make the viewer uncomfortable and uneasy, using a strobing, glitchy scrolling interface that makes it difficult to decide where to focus, a technique Gabrielle uses often.
INSIDE OUT - PANDEMIC 2020 is a self-portrait, super-imposing her body onto her environment, as she moves relentlessly through the city where everything has stopped.
KPOP REDACTION is part of a series where the highly stylized, performer-focused music videos of pop culture, are redacted, by reframing, rearranging, and recomposing but maintaining the real-time sequence of the original video. By cutting out the artists and focusing on areas of background, textures, sets, and props, the viewer is then forced to re-experience these videos in the absence of their main focus. This series poses the question: How is our gaze manipulated by the framing of these performers? What do we see when we remove the subjects?
TRAIN OF THOUGHT: This piece is a story from a dream that takes place on a train line along the border of east and west Berlin. The story unfolds as images layer, mirror and juxtapose, using fragments and found images of trains, cityscapes, and self portrait. This piece investigates dividing lines, physical boundaries, our sense of self and how we see ourselves when reflections superimpose our images onto others and identities and images merge. When the narrator sees their reflection in a passing train, the border dissolves, and at this inflection point the narrative reverses, and the video loops back to where it began, but with the narrator on the other side. The video is meant to play as a continuous loop.
