Dimitri Rastoropov

Tag: puredata

  • It has to be in person

    This piece has been specifically created for Seven Traces Contemporary Arts Festival in Caernarfon in 2014.

    The video art has been created by Jo Marsh has created an abstract film, which maps various parts of the local landscape. This was made using a purpose built sculpture which contained the camera and was rolled across the different terrains, filming as it travelled. Colourful components within the sculpture further abstracted the work, becoming painterly marks within the finished film.

    I made the ‘soundtrack’ to the film, playing with notions of sound design, movie soundtracks, and our perception of the relation between of sound and image. The sound art piece consists of field recordings made in a range of locations in Caernarfon during the night and the day, and of synthesised sound; the piece in general heavily relies on contrast and likeness between synthesised and recorded sound. The sound goes in and out of sync with the video, sometimes having no resemblance, sometimes being strangely suitable, but always forming new patterns within itself and with the video.

  • Synchronicity

    Synchronicity is a collaborative piece made by Andrew Smith and Dimitri Rastoropov. Video by Andrew Smith, sound by Dimitri Rastoropov.

  • every n seconds

    This is the ‘soundtrack’ that comes from a site-specific sound installation I created in the Making Time Garden at Lancaster University (an artwork in itself created by Jonathan Raisin and Elizabeth Willow).
    This installation is based on an often used phrase when we are wanted to be impressed by certain statistics: every N seconds X happens. While not statistically accurate, it is a powerful approximation that helps us understand statistics in a more empirical way: we can physically count these seconds and become aware of how often something (often horrible) occurs.
    This idea is taken as basis for this installation and these recurring events are presented in aural form so we can ‘hear the statistics’ instead of just reading them or trying to comprehend them in other ways. The installation consists of numerous statistical cycles that sometimes overlap and collide with each other.
    This installation is also based on an opposition of ‘here’ and ‘there’ in the sense that the shed with the piano is metaphorically thought of as ‘here’ and the sounds outside – as ‘there’, which is the case with statistics as they are almost always ‘there’.

  • Telos

    The main concept for this installation comes from the Greek concept of the ‘music of the spheres’ in which the orbits of all planets generate a tone and the simultaneous sounding of these tones generates a sort of divine harmony inaudible to humans.
    This installation is not an attempt to reconstruct or in any way make that harmony audible. Instead, using the connection between the movements of planets and sounds it aims to provide us with an opportunity to contemplate our place in time and the direct movement of time.
    The visual part of the installation is essentially a clock with astronomical dimensions and ranges from seconds to millennia. We always wait for the faster moving hand of a clock to make its turn and move the slower one waiting for something to happen: an event, an end of an event, etc. The larger the ‘hand’, the more grand is an event. I believe these things represent our everlasting anticipation of the future, an anticipation for events always more grand than the previous: a new year is more important than a new week, and a new millennium is more than another new year.
    The sounding part of the installation is reminiscent of Russian church bell ringing, with its repetitive rhythmical patterns and its multitudes of inharmonicity and non-tempered sounds. The sounds build up and then return to a sole bell ringing. A contemplation of this process (singularity-multitude-singularity) is also something that makes us aware of our place in time.