During the making of Norns I got familiar with Alvin Lucier and especially with his work ‘I am sitting in a room’. It triggered something in me that I found extremely interesting. A large portion of that also got incorporated into the software of Norns but I wanted to do more with it.

I found the same principe of recording a recording over and over again in saving a .jpeg image over and over again. Due to the compression of jpeg you lose information of visibility but you gain artefact information which forms a new and before unknown image. Much as with ‘I am sitting in a room’ where the initial recognizable sound gets lost but a new sound of built up sonic ambient resonant artefacts is made.

In ‘Ode to a Master [Mk.I]’ a photograph in .jpeg format is saved about 200-times building up compression and pixel artefacts. Every pixel in the image gets sonified by its changing R, G, B value due to the artefacts slowly forming as growing crystals. Mk.I is appended to the name because I see this as the first iteration of the work. While working on it I realized that the saving of the jpeg image is a nice parallel but not actually being one on one with ambient resonance. I tend to further develop and investigate this project to come to a satisfying conclusion on finding digital data resonance.