COLTON KEMPF - Audio Visual Cultures

Audiovisual Techniques for Scoring Home Movies  

This project began with the archive - over thirty hours of my family’s home video footage, shot between 1996 and 2010, that my father digitised and then left alone on a hard-drive. My first step into the archive was to collect the “scenes” that I was a part of. A narcissistic endeavour indeed, I was excessively interested in my own image. I wished to single out myself and my actions, either individually or in relation to the rest of my family. And so I trimmed out scenes that I was excluded from, such as my sisters’ concert recitals and theatre performances. Once I had a collection of self-populated scenes, I sifted through them over the course of several weeks, each day picking out different scenes to work with, or “play with," a term I use throughout to suggest the playful and experimental nature of the practice.  

For each scene or collection of scenes, I made an audiovisual work. In the end, the project became a practice, and I had eighteen distinct works. In some, I edited the music for the video. In others, I edited the video to the music. And in others, I did both. For every work, I separated the original audio from the video, sometimes weaving them back together. The separation allowed for many moments of audiovisual “mismatch” (Wollen, 2002), imbuing the practice with a sense of tension, or yearning - parts longing to be made whole again. In all of the works, I recorded vocal commentary of my process, sometimes including the commentary in the final audio track. Throughout the practice of making eighteen individual audiovisual works, I identified nine audiovisual techniques that were applied and employed throughout.  

The performance served as an embodied sample of the digital audiovisual practice, intended to convey its playful and improvisatory nature with the space and the technologies provided. In this instance, it was the EMS 7.1.4 Room that played host. The first half of the performance featured a 16-minute video of clips from the eighteen works, highlighting the nine different audiovisual techniques, and their examples cited in the exegesis. During the video’s projection, I played with the idea of showing the audience only what I wanted them to see - only a sample of the full practice. Such manipulation suggested a lineage of selective documentation and presentation that continues all the way up through this writing. In my original viewing of the home movies, I saw and heard only what my parents (mostly my father) had chosen to film. Now, the audience sees and hears only what I have chosen to reveal. I have wondered what a revelation might uncover about myself and the culture I come from.   

The second half of the performance provided a look into the creative and self-exploratory compulsion that inspired the techniques, attempting to translate the practice into physical form. Through many steps, I played around with my audiovisual techniques, and sampled the attempted destruction of a home movie tape. While the past cannot be destroyed, it can be re-worked, re-played, and re-sampled. Although methodised, the practice and its performance are intended to change with each representation. The eighteen audiovisual works have been completed, but the practice carries on, transforming itself across media and presenting itself through me. The process is ongoing... 

More info here: https://www.coltonkempf.com/majorproject  

See more of my practice at www.coltonkempf.com