Weidi
Zhang
Uneven Ground 2021
SOUND / NISSIM
VISUAL / Weidi Zhang
It is a great pleasure to collaborate with Berlin-based musician NISSIM during the pandemic. NISSIM works in unconventional ways, and all the tracks in his new album–Uneven Ground–are one takes without edits, production, and rebalance. I am very impressed with the way he produced music, which makes every track timeless. He describes this album as a journey of searching and snapshots of down and falls in life. Being consistent with how he made this track, ‘Uneven Ground,’ I used a real-time rendering engine to design and program a data-driven generative visual system. I adjust this system’s parameters in real-time when I listen to this track, and it generates multiple visual footages. Those unique footages are one-takes with chances and indeterminacy. I assembled the footage together as my emotional response to this track. Life is a journey, a one-take, and at the same time, an adventure. In this video, I create a journey of a virtual creature using abstract visual language. It struggles, moves, transforms, searches for meanings, and evolves with the music. It is a metaphor in this poetry of life. Like Heraclitus said: “Everything flows, and nothing abides; everything gives way, and nothing stays fixed. You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on. It is in changing that things find repose.”