ELECTROCHROMA is an audiovisual work that emerged from the treatment of light, generated images and
sound, and translations of image to sound. This work was created utilizing 16mm celluloid, various extended
techniques and digital processes to manipulate both audio and moving image. The work’s imagery ranges
from dark to light monochromatic, spheres shifting tonality and intensity from mild to high saturation, including
flickering and pulsating rhythms, afterimage, and sensory overloads. The sound composition was arranged for
5.1-surround resulting in tones, overtones, profound bass echoing, modulated frequencies, textures, static
noises, and electronic sounds moving through space. The 58’30” audiovisual work will play on the hour
throughout the day.

From the Village Voice:
On the far wall of a small black room, projected blobs of white light flash and flicker, while unnerving electronic
tones—throbbing, buzzing, droning—move through surrounding speakers, circling your head and, at some
frequencies, sitting inside it. Like a symphony in length and design, the work begins with a quiet, repeated
pulsing, and then gathers momentum, reaching moments of such intensity that the piercing chaos seems to
vibrate actual neurons. Comments By Robert Shuster Wednesday, Nov 17 2010

While the Village Voice goes on to describe Electrochroma as “a 58-minute endurance test of sensory
bombardment”, Richard’s Garet’s audiovisual installation, to our eyes and ears, is in fact about the process
of translation. Garet’s process begins by capturing an abstract play of light onto 16mm film. He then recaptures
the film onto digital video, playing at the limits of both analog and digital media’s abilities to render light as
images, and harnassing the particular artifacts of each: various kinds of flicker, stuttering motion, saturation
and over-modulation, and the effects of extreme intensity that many of these abstract artifacts render on a
viewer. You find yourself suddenly in a space that does not cohere properly as a visual environment, but rather
is in constant, but not chaotic, transformation. Images peel away from the flat projection space as after-images
on your retina, while the intensity of the light spills outward, infecting the overall environment in all directions.

The images in Electrochroma take on the power of an overall environmental effect, one that is closer to the
effects of sound on a listener. The visual is in a constant translation into the aural. And in return, the sound
environment, while immersive in the extreme, uses that immersive power to focus the viewer in space, making
you aware of your position, physicality, movements, and sensitivity to effects. In this way the sound is in constant
translation into a kind of proto-vision. The viewer encounters the work in the midst of this complex audio-visual
crossing: at the churning, hovering point where vision and hearing are in mutual translation and metamorphosis
into a composite force.

This synethesthetic field of force does not render any recognizable images or sounds per se, but marshalls the
specific effects of seeing and hearing to open a new envelope of space around a viewer, a space which is itself
focused on fixing and controlling the viewer in that space. This double movement of opening space and fixing its
subject is felt by a viewer as the tightly-controlled delirium that the Village Voice describes. It’s the hallucinatory
space not of the wild freak-out but of the discliplined visionary, overcoming the boundaries between senses to find
the greater powers of space and environment that hover in the transits between categories. Electrochroma reveals
a real transformative power of media within real spaces and upon real persons, and is something that we at PPL
are excited to be exploring with the guidance of Garet’s powerful example.

Artist: Richard Garet
Title: ELECTROCHROMA
Duration: 58’30” approximately
Media: Digital + 5.1 dolby surround
Year: 2007-10

Artist: Richard Garet
Title: ELECTROCHROMA
Duration: 58’30” approximately
Media: Digital + 5.1 dolby surround
Year: 2007-10