Lucas Paris explores a virtual wilderness in real time for Light Center Folds

Featuring music and synthesis from the AV artist’s musical side project, Sweetspots.

AV artist Lucas Paris explores the softer side of audiovisual performance culture in Light Center Folds, a technicolour exploration of a virtual wilderness recorded live, in real time, for Fact. “Light Center Folds is a digital environment of complexity fusing a range of themes and research into a real time audiovisual environment captured live for the final video work,” explains Paris. “This work stems from the efforts of imagining the rules of a virtual environment from scratch with a conscious effort to move the use of game engines beyond adversity, conflict, attack, evaluation, scoring and reward.”

Chasing light particles around a barren wasteland populated with glitched-out emoji collages, grotesque CGI sculptures, skeletal vector art and digital foliage, Paris dives deeper into the virtual space of an audiovisual environment, viewing it through a specifically spatial lens. Exploding flattened notions of user interface, Paris glides between discarded landmarks of digital detritus, expanding the two dimensions of a smartphone screen or laptop display into a fully developed world. “Its main threads are post-internet glimpses of retail spaces, cloth, intimacy, emoji constructions, forces and energy,” says Paris, “supported by sonic particules and tightly synchronized AV synthesis elements.”

“The soundtrack is in two parts,” he continues. “Some elements of the game engine have their own audio synthesis algorithms, linked to their velocity and animation attributes.” The background of ecstatic sharp synth stabs and emotional electronics is a track from Paris’s musical side project, Sweetspots. Described by the artist simply as “electronic synth sparkles”, Sweetspots fashions pupil-dilating synthscapes from a deceptively restrained sonic palette.

‘Light Centre Folds’ is out now. You can discover more of his music at Bandcamp and follow Sweetspots on Instagram. For more information about Lucas Paris and his work, you can follow him on Instagram and visit his website.