Gard Gitlestad

Video art

Vridd - Sassy 009

Live video art for concerts with the band Sassy 009, made in collaboration with Ingrid Solvik, as the duo Vridd. We collected a variety of objects in nature – such as leaves, moss and pine needles – which were filmed using a macro lens over a light table. This video feed was then processed by a modular video synthesizer and glitch electronics, partly controlled by sound input from stage.

Sassy 009 at Øyafestivalen, Oslo in 2018
Sassy 009 at Rockefeller, Oslo in 2018

Steel

Remix of a 1936 information/propaganda film about the steel industry in the United States. Originally made as part of a live video work for a band, this small sub-project developed into a work of its own, in form of a small collection of still images.

The film was manipulated on an X-Y vector display (a display technology similar to CRT oscilloscopes), then mixed with the original version and colourised on a modular video synthesizer.

Vrangside

«Vrangside» was an audiovisual live performance for the 2016 Piksel festival in Bergen, Norway. It was based on audio and video field recordings from an underground sewage system, which were manipulated through analogue modular video and sound synthesizers.

In addition to the live performance on the opening night of the Piksel festival, «Vrangside» was also adapted into a site specific installation, which was on exhibit in an abandoned Mill outside Bergen.

«The project takes the audience on a journey starting at the source of a large sewage pipe, and follows the sewage through the underground in pipes, tunnels and pumping stations before arriving at a large plant where it is filtered, cleaned and treated before being released into a fjord as pure and clean water.

The soruce material video and audio recorded with simple and partly home-made equipment, including a primitive open source hydrophone which is used to record the (surpirsingly jolly) sound of the sewage itself. The material is then processed with a modular analogue video synthesizer in Eurorack format.

The aim of the project is primarily to show the unique and surprising aesthetic qualities of the sewage infrastructure, and to draw some attention to a much needed, but often somewhat forgotten part of our citites. The project makes no claim of being particularly scientific.»

Live performance photos by Laimonas Puisys