Mandala

1991, Colour, 40 minutes, 1” C-format master
Music composed and performed by Mike Ray (with Lorraine Anderson)
Edited by Mike Ray

Traditionally, mandalas are circular images used for meditation and symbolise the unity of creation. This video evokes the same spirit through a modern medium.

Mandala was a new departure after a break of several years. Conceived from the start as a potentially “commercial” video, it used a more accessible sound track than earlier pieces.

It is unique amongst my work in that all the imagery is initially digitally generated and then transformed through a wide variety of analogue and digital techniques. Despite this, the overall impact retains considerable fluidity and sometimes striking relationship to the natural world. I always consider my work to be very “natural” despite its complete reliance on a technical medium for both its production and its continued existence! I have never seen any boundary between art and science, technology and nature regarding them as integrally inter-connected.

The analogue and digital feedback techniques used relate closely to the discovery of and interest in fractals developing at that time in other contexts. I was always intrigued by the inter-relationship between states of order and chaos as they get expressed at differing times in natural processes. This was a theme I consistently explored in the Seventies videos, long before the mathematics of those processes had been decoded by fractal mathematicians.

Mandala was put together by combining processes of live mixing and image processing followed by video editing. The music was developed throughout this process so that neither the sound nor the image led the other too directly. This sympathetically extended the “performance” elements of earlier pieces, where the two aspects took place completely simultaneously, to allow this more complex piece of work to be created. The work was realised over a period of a few months using the Videokalos synthesiser in conjunction with Diverse Production’s post-production facility.

The video is constructed in seven sections with the last mirroring the first - a frequent structural device in my work that is intended to suggest the cyclic nature of the processes that inspire me. The overall work is very “centred” visually, and is intended to stimulate a “centering” of consciousness in a similar spirit to the mandalas of some Eastern religions. The tape is meditative, but not in the often used passive sense of the word as I believe meditations can be very dynamic processes.