After the recent albums reissue of Lena Platonos by the Dark Entries US, our beloved and very well known Lena came back to continue her international carrier.
The conceptualization and the design of the videos, had been accomplished under her supervision in order to visualize as precisely as possible her imaginary by proposing a minimalistic iconography to accompany her live performances.
My main target was to completely avoid the creation of a “moving wallpaper” (aka screensavers) which is a very common disease in live visual matters. In order to do so (as a loyal fan of Lena Platonos) I had to follow strictly her narrations in her tracks without being picturesque or very narrative by myself and keep all the videos in a continuous evolution with discreet parts such as start – middle – end. So I picked a more abstract and intuitive way to express all the feelings and dynamics of her pieces without losing the coherency between the tracks as keeping the videos discreet and adjusted to tracks’ mystical ambience.
The videos are recognized by their clear and geometric shapes, they are audio reactive and most of them are blue-red tinted, only few exceptions occurred, where blurry surfaces are being mixed with 3d fluids and lite glitch noise are being introduced in very specific points and parts.
An additional goal was to end up with a “VJ machine”, an integrated system where the setup would be obviously portable and independent from the physical presence of an actual VJ. I am mentioning this, because it wasnt all about the design aspect of this project in the terms of an artistic approach, but to design also a tool, capable of reproducing the videos synchronously and work well together the musicians rig.
As this collaboration continues, the plans for a very next step is to improve this vj machine (as the videos get improved by retouching and refining them) and add also a module to control (automatically) the lights on stage. This is a very big challenge, cause most of the times there are no standard specifications and we have always to be compromised with the different stages and their equipment around the world.