Max Cooper - Ascent - Official video by Martin Krzywinski

► ASCENT digital art collection: ► Buy merch / vinyl / Blu-ray: ► Sign up & join Discord: MAX COOPER: This audio-visual project with Martin Krzywinski came from site specific feelings and ideas. Initially St Michielskerk Leuven, and then Herodes Atticus amphitheatre at the Acropolis in Athens, where the project had its first two outings into the world. I was trying to capture the uncapturable idea of transcendence. It needed to ascend further than anything I had made before. I tried to keep it as simple as possible to focus on the power of what would yield that experience, the synth chords and timbre. I kept the chord progression fairly loose so as not to fall into obvious repeats, and constantly modulated it higher as the many layers of screaming distortion built along with some bass wave interference which gives some extra low body shaking effect if you listen with good bass response or a sub-pac. The initial installation version was built with beds containing low frequency shakers so you would lie down and have your whole body vibrated as you looked up into the ceiling of the cathedral, for something like a weightlessness effect. In order to create transcendence visually, I chatted to Martin about two techniques which I felt would provide a fittingly intense and overwhelming analogy. An ascent in spatial dimensionality, combined with a mapping of the digits of a transcendental number. We are used to living in 3-dimensions of space, but we can construct models of worlds in whatever number of spatial dimensions we want. Martin coded a system to start from a 1-dimensional point and smoothly transition up to 5-dimensions of space, alongside creating a tree map of the digits of pi, similarly to our old Transcendental Tree Map project from Yearning for the Infinite album, but now mapped to the surfaces of 5D hypercubes. Needless to say it goes heavy on the visual barrage, peaking in noise, just as the music epic visual job from Martin! Thanks for having a read and a look and listen. If you want to find out about wider Unspoken Words project this is part of, please visit MARTIN KRZYWINSKI: The scene takes place on a 5-dimensional stage, which is projected onto two dimensions for display. Initially, all dimensions are collapsed. Initially, the first dimension grows to form a line. Then the second to form a square and the third to form a cube. When the fourth dimension is introduced, it has the effect of creating what appears to be two copies of the cube. The cubes are slowly joined by lines, which represent the edges in the fourth dimension. This is followed by the appearance of the fifth dimension and edges that connect to it. A 5-dimensional cube (), or penteract, has 32 vertices and 80 edges, 80 2-dimensional faces, 40 3-dimensional faces and 10 4-dimensional (tesseract) faces. As the 5-dimensional cube rotates, you can get a glimpse of its lower-dimensional components, like 3-dimensional cubes coming in and out of focus. Individual faces of the 5-dimensional cube are traced out and split off from the cube to form 5 independently rotating cubes. The scene itself rotates throughout the clip in 5-dimensions. Outlines of tree maps of the first approximation of Pi (22/7) start appearing on various faces of these cubes. For more details about these maps, see The corners of each cube begin to be filled in — there are 5 axes at each corner. We can see the planes at these corners shrink and grow as the cubes and scene continue to rotate in 5-dimensions. In color versions of this video, the color of each plane encodes its position in the third dimension, which can be thought as in/out of the screen. Next, tree map segments for the next approximation of pi (179/57) are projected and grow on the faces of four new 5-dimensional cubes. The scene evolves towards a specific rotation in 5-dimensional space that temporarily reduces the complexity of the elements on the screen. Further rotation changes the point of view and we see the complexity of everything again. For the finale, another four cubes are added to the scene with tree maps of the digits of Pi. The scene now contains 13 5-dimensional cubes independently rotating, with continuous changes to the scale of each dimension. The number of individual elements on the scene grows so large as to render a scene that is essentially noise. The scene ends with all 5 dimensions collapsing. As elements shrink, we glimpse the entirety of the stage before it fades away. CREDITS Music: Max Cooper, Visuals: Martin Krzywinski, Label: Mesh, All video & audio copyright is owned by Max Cooper - no use without permission