ELECTRIC SHEEP
Electronic music, video & experimental photography - 2023
Electric Sheep was created in 2023, the year after I completed my Master’s degree, while I was studying Arts Management at IHECS. For my project, I decided to produce and release an electronic music single conceived as a complete audiovisual work: the track would be available on streaming platforms and accompanied by a visualizer on YouTube.
It was also during this period that my research into glitch took a new direction. After experimenting with file corruption and databending in Blue, I became interested in intervening directly in the device that produces the image.
This led me to circuit bending, a practice that involves altering an electronic device by creating connections within its circuitry that were never intended by its original design. Applied to a digital camera, this process makes it possible to interfere directly with its electronic behaviour, producing visual disruptions at the very moment the image is captured. Unlike my earlier databending experiments, the glitch was no longer applied to an existing photograph: it emerged directly within the camera during the act of taking the picture.
To test my first modified camera, I simply photographed what I had at hand: my desk lamp.
Its bulb produced an almost perfect circle of light. But through the modified camera, this ordinary shape was transformed. Almost immediately, my imagination began to develop around what I was seeing. The glowing circle of a lamp on my desk could suddenly become a distant and mysterious planet, an unknown celestial body, but also a cell observed under a microscope.
I became fascinated by this movement between the infinitely large and the infinitely small. The same form could evoke both the structures that make up living organisms and worlds existing at distances almost impossible to comprehend. The camera had not simply altered what I was photographing: through its malfunction, it had allowed me to see something else within an object I already knew perfectly well.
These first images became the visual material for Electric Sheep. I used them to build the visual universe surrounding the single and to create its visualizer, once again bringing together my research in photography, moving image and electronic music.
With Blue, I was still searching for different ways to corrupt and transform an image. With Electric Sheep, something had shifted:
I was no longer simply modifying the image. I was modifying the tool that was looking at it.
