Composer: Allan Schindler
Filmmakers: Stephanie Maxwell

Preferred performance formats:
1. DV CAM
   
2. Mini DV
   

Lower quality alternative performance formats:
1. Beta SP
   
2. DVD video
   
3. S-VHS tape (lowest quality; for audition purposes only; not for performance)
   

This collaboratively conceived and realized film/musical composition presents an ever changing flux and paradox in perceived space and location involving notions of navigation, geometry, and mapping. The animated imagery was derived from hand paintings and etchings on 35mm motion picture film. During subsequent digital editing the film was physically bent, twisted, rotated and treated to a number of hands-on manipulations.

The basic musical sound sources include mbira, bamboo pipe, gamelan metallophone and vocal phoneme samples digitally transformed by Csound, granulation, SMS, phase vocoder, cross synthesis and algorithmic compositional procedures, then contrapuntally layered, intercut and threaded into pulsating "spider web" designs suggested by the visual imagery.

JPG stills

Quicktime audio/video clips

MP3 audio excerpt
This excerpt begins approximately one minute into the work.
Duration : 51 seconds; size 1.5 MB ; encoding 256 kBit stereo

Stephanie Maxwell teaches film, video and animation courses at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her experimental animated films have been exhibited in film festivals and on television internationally, and collected as works of art by European and American museums.

terra incognita was premiered on the April 7, 2001 program of the ImageMovementSound festival in Rochester, New York. Subsequent performances/exhibitions have included:

The Tank, New York, 2004 Ottawa International Animation Festival, "Meet the Masters" presentation, Ottawa, 2004; Music of Allan Schindler concert, Rochester, 2004; LUX Cinema, London, 2003; SCRATCH Cinema series, Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Paris, 2003; Surrey Institute of Art and Design presentation, Farnham, England, 2003; ASIFA East Animation Festival traveling exhibition, New York, Hollywood, Seatle and other cities, 2002, award for "Excellence in Experimental Techniques"; International Computer Music Conference, Goteberg, Sweden, 2002; Zagreb Animafest 2002, Zagreb, Croatia, 2002; Slovenska Kinoteka, Ljubljana, Slovenia - 2002; Nashville Independent Film Festival, Nashville, Tennessee - 2002; Images Festival of Independent Film and Video , Toronto, Canada - 2002; XFest , Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, 2002; Not Still Art Festival , New York, New York and touring exhibition, 2002; Sound and Vision multimedia exhibition, Stetson University, DeLand, Florida, 2002; World Animation Celebration Festival , Los Angeles, California, 2001; School of Film and Animation - Rochester Institute of Technology , Rochester, New York, 2001; Len Lye and the Direct Cinema Tradition, Pacific Film Archive , Berkeley, California, 2001; Now What? New Works, Visual Music Festival, Portland, OR, 2002; Northwest Film Forum, Seattle, WA, 2002; MicroCineFest, Baltimore, 2002; Cornell University, Center for Performing Arts concert, Ithaca, New York, 2001; Webster University Film Series, St. Louis, 2002; Alternative Cinema and Digital Techniques multimedia exhibition, Syracuse University, 2002
A video DVD including terra incognita was published and included with the winter 2003 edition of Computer Music Journal. Unfortunately, however, on this release the music and image of terra are more than a second out of sync.

Return to Allan Schindler's List of Compositions