Rorschach Project - 2016
Rorschach Project
2016
5ch HD Video, sesli 5ch HD Video with sound
Loop 4”20’
Created by
Arda Yalkin
Musicians:
Vocals: Nil İpek
El. Guitar: Efe Demiral
El. Bass: İlker Göçmen
Trumpet: Barış Demirel
"The five-channel video Rorschach Project deals with improvisation and chance as methods for artistic creation. It is questioning our perception of war images on the internet and in social media. Arda Yalkın first nearly randomly created a collage of around 2.000 images of war scenes disasters, and then alienated and abstracted them through the application of animation techniques. Afterwards, he invited four musicians to react spontaneously to the video. While seeing it for the first time, they recorded voices and sounds in real time. In the end, Yalkın merged them into one soundtrack. So, an interaction of spontaneous musical expressions formed the sound-texture for Arda Yalkın’s conceptual and visual framework. The result is surprisingly coherent, as a harmony between the musicians is given. It seems as if the various sound-streams had been recorded by one band. So, the video-collageposses a certain visuality that was perceived by the musicians in a similar way.
This work has two dimensions: The first is about the coherence between sound and visuals. The second, and more important one, relates to the conceptual framework and the game rules that Yalkın has set up. Due to the discussion of the notion of artistic creation, and the review of the interconnections between rationalism and subjectivism, as well as plan and improvisation, Rorschach Project means more than just an interdisciplinary experiment."
Marcus Graf
Assoc. Prof. Dr. for Art History at Yeditepe University.
Program Director at Contemporary Istanbul and Resident Curator at Plato Sanat in Istanbul
"Even if this video seems to be related improvisation and sound, what led me to make this video is the reflex of the people to the notifications on social media. Therefore, I turned the images of violence and war all taken from news portals and social media into animation by filtering them just like I do our own notifications in daily life. While getting this animation, I processed every single video frame one by one via a script I wrote. Four musicians who watched these images for the first time, improvised music to these images. And I bound together this independent music like a song.
When Rorschach Project was revealed to me as an opinion I had no idea how it would seem. People were reproducing and sharing their own pictures with the techniques of various painters. This opinion seemed interesting and I created a script that works under a photo running software. Mine resembled more of a watercolor paint. Later, I created a video by adding lots of news images shared on social media end to end, reproduced the video by processing every single video frame (around 2000 images). When I combined the image I get with the other animations I made, the result was an animation so realistic that it looks hand drawn."