video – Felicia R. Glidden

I started mining my dream journals of 25 years in 2010. I began to type them out and then read them aloud into a recorder. I soon realized the first line usually either set the scene, or the cast of character. The written document is 20 pages single spaced.

I projected it as a looped video text in 2016 in my studio exhibition in Germany. It felt less invasive for me for a German audience to read as they didn’t know any of the characters in the dreams. I wrote it exactly as I found it in my journals, leaving first and sometimes last names attached. Later in my sound work I would turn the names into pronouns to make the work more universal.

The work is written about in this review (in English and German.)

At the opening, the piece was projected onto the musicians Alain and Philippe Wozniak as they played.

Jupiter by Philippe Wozniak Part 4 of 5 from Liminal Spaces
Alain Wozniak: Clarinet, Electonics
Philippe Wozniak: E Bass
ProjekTraum l’Atelier Glidden Wozniak
Felicia Glidden Open Studio
March 6, 2016

Inspired by the research of Joachim Ernst Berendt Liminal Spaces uses frequencies calculated by the circulating time of the planets. An oscillator playing alongside the performance reproduces these frequencies. The melodies used are transcribed from traditional ceremonies of Native Americans from North-Central America.
Each movement describes another state of mind, the liminal space between dreams and real world.

The working title for this piece was Last Night Grandma Helped Me Make My Bed.

studio F Glidden — Temporary studio installation with Wrapped Piller foam, cotton rope, and plaster – Last Night Grandma Helped Me Make My Bed wood and juniper needles – Cigarette Machine ; cast iron, steel and small gifts from friends

Last Night Grandma Helped Me Make My Bed. This is the first sound piece. I layered the tracks to reflect the way memory can sometimes be muddled, partial and concurrent.

Here‘s a video where I used seven minutes of that soundtrack

Cloud Rust single channel video 7 minutes 2010

The dance improvisation of me in the library (4:12 – 5:25) was conceived, edited and developed by Bernhard Thomas Klein with a musical improvisation by Dorle Ferber, Bernhard Thomas Klein, Max Sharam, Alain Wozniak and photographed by Marcus Schweier at the residency Salem2salem in 2010.

Prometheus 2015 Symphony for Orchestra, Light and Video installation at the Muttertagkonzert “Sound and Colour” 14 x 5 m (46 x 16 ft) Graf-Zeppelin-Haus, Friedrichshafen, Germany; 2015

For Philippe Wozniak’s version of Prometheus 2015, I developed a series of short videos from the landscape, and urban settings. I am onstage with the orchestra using VJ software Resolume Arena with an AKAI controller to coordinate moving photographs, layered imagery and moving light to correspond with the music. The colors shift in speed, intensity and transparency to the movements: Will of the Spirit, Humanity, Dreams, Damnation, and Freeing of Prometheus.

Felicia Glidden
Live Video Composition

Philippe Wozniak
Composer

Symphonisches Jugendblasorchester Friedrichshafen

Alain Wozniak
Musical Director

Daniel Dominguez Teruel
Sound Design

Winfried Schlerde
Poem

Viola Sauter
Reader

Improvisation
Julius Rreger
Bassoon
Nicolas Wozniak
Oboe

I saw the Art or Sound exhibition at the Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2014 which showed the original color keyboard by Scriabin. The catalog had this to say about the symphony Prometheus: the Poem of Fire:

“The symphony “Prometheus: the Poem of Fire (1910) by Russian pianist and composer Alexander Scriabin (Moscow, 1872-1915) was the first composition in history to include notation for lights, interlacing color with sound to create multi-sensorial harmony.
Scriabin envisaged the use of a color keyboard to transpose the “Luce” part of his score into colored light projections for his symphony, associating the 12 tones of the chromatic scale with 12 colors that changed in conjunction with the basic tones of the harmonies.

A specially designed multi-color light projector with colored light bulbs was made from the model by physicist Alexander Moser for the first performance of Prometheus, which was given in Moscow on March 15th, 1911, but the machine that was supposed to perform the lighting part did not operate. The first public presentation of Scriabin’s symphony accompanied by colored lighting happened a year later at the Carnegie Hall in NY. The color portion of the score was played with a color-projection instrument, later named the Chromola, made by Preston S. Miller, a specialist in lighting.” From the Catalogue for “Art or Sound” exhibition at the Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2014.

Composer Philippe Wozniak on this work:

“Every sound that surrounds us, every note, which is played is oscillation. Each color and structure that we see is also a vibration. They all obey similar laws. Where do the combination of these oscillations of color, structure and music lead us?

This question that composer Alexander Scriabin asked in the early twentieth century are revisited by these artists today. Based on Scriabin’s orchestral work “Promethee” (Le Poeme du feu; op. 60) and the myth of Prometheus, Philippe Wozniak collaborates with musicians and visual artists to create a contemporary sound, music and moving light installation.”

This work is supported by Netzwerk Neue Musik , Baden-Würtemburg Stiftung, Kulturbüro Friedrichshafen and Sparkasse Bodensee.