Video, words, voice and music are all by Brenda Clews, who notes in the YouTube description:

I meditate regularly and often do yoga sets. Especially I do this when I am working through issues. During one of my sessions last week the metaphor of the wall arose, and while resting after the yoga set I picked up my iPhone and began speaking, intending to write a prose poem from my voice notes. I left the recording as is, and added the background of sounds and instruments. My speaking of the words is not a performance but an embodiment of the meaning. Then I began to work with recent footage of a lightning storm I had shot. Initially, when looking at the rushes, I was perturbed that I hadn’t removed the mesh screen. Yet the footage is perfect for this video. The subconscious is all of a processing, mobile, energy of constantly equilibrating unity, and what we are voicing here is what we are filming there. Our lives are always moving beyond their boundaries as we push into deeper processes of who we are, alone and together.

Brenda also blogged a few process notes at Rubies in Crystal, where she went into more detail about the soundtrack:

The sound track is a midi file of the text that I generated at http://www.p22.com/musicfont/ and yes, I used copters, and gunshot, and a pad4choir from the music text generator (I did have to copy the sound files from the site one by one and mix them later) and ethereal sunrise, smooth clav, whirly, and nature sounds from GarageBand, plus the original track of thunder and lightning, so it is meant to be a bit, well a bit of a war zone. It works, but it’s not for relaxation, obviously!

(1) In Your Wildest Dreams

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(2) Pastimes

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(3) Splitting Image

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(4) Watching

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(5) Nature

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I’ve tended not to feature a whole lot of videos in which the emphasis is more on the video than the poetry, and the text couldn’t stand on its own. But that bias is a little unfair to the avant-garde videopoetry tradition, which has always emphasized the interdependence of the two. Canadian artist and writer Valerie LeBlanc’s Downtown series from 2003 is solidly within this tradition, and each video is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. The common-place thoughts ascribed to urban apartment-dwellers gain depth and pathos by juxtaposition with the unreal context upon which they are superimposed as simple kinetic text. In her very interesting notes on the series, LeBlanc discusses how she played with visual ambiguities and the expectations of viewers, and cites French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as a central influence:

Part of my practice involves using video in ways that are sometimes perceived to be proprietary to film. In my 2003 series Downtown, the images on billboards are literally positioned as ‘the thinking image’ [1] as defined by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2: The Time-Image. The images of people, laid out by marketers to sell condominium lifestyle, are juxtaposed with texts that speak thoughts for those future residents. The subjects contemplate existence and the videos end with the revelation that it is the voice of an image that speaks over time, in what is literally ‘a 2-dimensional world.’ In reality, on closer inspection, it becomes obvious that some of the subjects have taken on character weaknesses closely resembling the problems sometimes associated with high-density living. For example, in Splitting Image, the young Asian male on the balcony actually appears to be more in the headspace of committing suicide than ‘Living the Dream.’ When viewing the image even closer, it becomes obvious that this character with the fully developed imagination of the protagonist is less than a full image. He had been constructed from a face and shirt pulled from a marketers’ catalogue, and yet, he has everything he needs to sell inner-city condos. Not many, if any of the GRP’s (Gross Rating Point) passing audience members will probably notice that he has no hands and no lower body. The ‘half-man’ is floating above the balcony wall. And yet, with a quick drive by, he appears complete, the man who ‘owns’ in a desired real estate market.

Read the rest.

Canadian poet and artist Brenda Clews does it all here: drawing, filming, editing, even constructing the music. “The world is a green furor of creativity – the green fire of life,” she writes in the description at YouTube, where she provides a detailed description of her process, including this note about the music:

I created the music in a cool program, a ‘P22 Music Text Composition Generator (A free online music utility)’: http://www.p22.com/musicfont In this program, each letter has a sound. When you put text in, you can choose what BMP and instrument you’d like, and the program generates a midi file, with the sheet music. I layered my track in GarageBand 6.0.2 using different instruments, splicing and re-arranging. [...]

From start to finish took about 12 hours, there were many layers, of image, text, and sound, each with filters, and I had to render a few times, which took hours, to see if what I had produced worked.