Interviewed by Karen Karnak this video explores the snakebeings archives, cutting between timezone and location to explore some of the creative strategies and ideas behind some of the work seen on this website.
Alternatively titled "Ritual Remnants", after the exhibition in Port Chalmers 2018, the documentary follows the creative practice of Emit Snake-Beings which incorporates electronics, sound, video and sculpture. "Ritual Remnants" describes the left-over images, sounds and video material which have been created almost as a by-product of the more performance-based aspects of the creative practice. Whilst "without conscious effort" is a way of describing the way that materials collaborate in the formation of new technologies which fuse together art and science and the more mystical side of electronic alchemy. Drawing on a vast archive of material the visuals are used as trigger points to initiate or illustrate topics brought up in a series of interviews conducted by Karen Karnak during 2018.
DiY[do-it-yourself] electronics is a large part of my work - along with all sorts of creative technologies - but how can machines be creative; can ideas of animism be extended to technology? a GOOD QUESTION.. Often its the accidents and mutations produced by technologies which interest me most. I find that when machines 'go wrong' we get to find out all sorts of new uses for old technologies.
Some people call it "spectulative design"- making stuff as a way of exploring what can be possible - What does it sound like when we combine 2 or 3 different prime number sound frequencies?
Ever wondered: 'what does a prayer machine look like?'
Port Chalmers ArtScience Residency: March - August 2018 (click to see full archive)
Travels in Kerala 2017/2018
Techno-Animism:
Filmed at London Hackspace an open-source maker space located in Hackney E8.
Machines made by Emit Snake-Beings during 2017 & 2016 for Hull, UK city of culture.
Hear the original sound sources in the audio archive.
Bingo-Splicer / Bingodisiac device
Prime numbers are selected randomly and displayed as dotmatrix. Sound is selected from seven internal Mp3 players. Voices, music, street recordings and collected sounds are fed into the bingo-splicer which then chops up the sounds into fragments. A nine step rhythm generator (Nine switches in a circle generating trigger beats) is fed into seven sound gates. Patterns are made from the trigger beats allowing short fragments of sounds to go through either left or right oscilloscopes and into the sound recorder.
Various layers have been overdubed and edited.
Emit Snake-Beings has been making stuff from recycled materials since 1982, when he built a spring reverb machine from a loud speaker, a couch spring and a record pickup cartridge. As well as musical instruments and sound boxes he started a collection of coin operated electrical (interactive) Shrines in 1990 after failing to destroy the final shrine in a series of destructive artworks documented in the ritual-performance super 8mm film 'The Shrine' (see the 'Ethnographic Film' link above) or check out the 8mm photography -still images made from the video transfer of 8mm films. .
Music Video made by Snake-Beings for Greg Locke's The Trons
Extensive sound archives of Snake-Beings can be heard on this website, in addition to many of the visual archives which have been collected on the way, some of which are created under the pseudonym 'Edward Godsmyth', and collaborative works under the name Karen Karnak, Bingodisiac and Circuit47. In 2016 Dr. Emit Snake-Beings was awarded a doctorate for his thesis exploring DiY [Do-it-Yourself] technologies and techno-animist approaches to material agency - Publications and research can also be viewed and read here, also documented in the form of journal articles and posters for performance events (click on the link to 'Research Portfolio' above).
Ethnographic film:
creative processes documentary made for painter James Robinson.
Others from the portrait series:
exploring their creative practices and approaches to technology and art.
Interactive devices
DiY[do-it-yourself] experimental electronics is a large part of my work. Using Arduino I discovered that I could make quite complex sound making devices, including the Bingodizicator device (or numeralogical sound Masticator) on the interactive electronics page (see link below). I am currently working on a series of Arduino sensors to create a nine channel theremin-type unit to control a DiY analogue synthersizer i have built using a programmable Axoloti soundboard and miles and miles of wires... Various other interactive devices made by Dr Emit Snake-Beings are archived on this site, including the collection of over 30 coin-operated electrical shrines made between 1990 & 2001 and later devices using Arduino, Axoloti and Raspberry Pi technologies. There is also a collection of macromedia Flash interactive devices, such as the various cut-up and linguistic Masticators burried within the deeper realms of the archive. For a start you could try looking at the
'Interactive Diy Electronics page' or the 'Electrical shrines' page both under the 'Arte-Facts' tab above.
Death of an orchestra- Stop frame animation - Snakebeings
Intersections between Art, Magic, Technology & Religion.
