Overview

ANNIE HOLT
STUDENT OF FINE ART, KINGSTON UNIVERSITY

This portfolio is culmination of work selected that I have produced while at university between 2017 and 2019 over my second and third academic years. I work both in visual mediums and with music; my work is primarily focused around music and the spaces it occupies, and the visual pieces included here form part of my ongoing explorations into representing music and sound with images. All the works I produced for this academic year displayed on this portfolio can be found in the links below, listed chronologically:

Level 6/Year 3 work

“IMPROVISATION ON CANVAS” Collaborative Process Painting
“MUSICAL BEASTS” Drawings
ANGELUS NOVUS
Visual Score “creatures” studies
“SPECULATIVE MACHINES” Diagrams
“NOISE MACHINE” concept and experiments
HOTEL-KLAVIER [L6 Exhibition piece 2019]

All my work from last year can also be found on this blog, chronologically listed individual links below:

Level 5/Year 2 work

STATION #1
HOWLIN’
MACHINERY/GUITAR
“SOUND MAP” Visual Scores
SUBWAYS
RESTAURANT PIECE
“RESTAURANT PIECE”: Improvisational Performance
After “RESTAURANT PIECE”: Three Studies in Entropy
12 IMAGINARY PIECES
Visual Score “fragment” studies
Altered Scores

All Level 6 work
All Level 5 work

“IMPROVISATION ON CANVAS” Collaborative Process Painting

“Improvisation on Canvas” oil painting, 76x76cm

Detail from “Improvisation on Canvas”

Oil painting on canvas, 76x76cm
Collaboration with Idris Woodroffe
September 2018

Improvised painting to music as part of a two person collaboration, with each new colour added successively as a new layer of paint overlapping the previous, as part of a study in producing a spontaneous response to music in visuals.

“MUSICAL BEASTS” Drawings

beastofnewyear — “Beast of New Year”, Jan 2019

A selection of drawings I produced of imaginary “beasts” as part of explorations into visual representations of music.

ANGELUS NOVUS

3:04 min, digital audio file (.mp3)
January 2019

“A storm is blowing from Paradise…”
Sample based audio collage moving through four different musical environments in stages, based around Paul Klee’s 1920 painting “Angelus Novus”.

Visual Score “creatures” studies

“Light House (for torch horn)” Watercolour, Nov 2018

Visual scores and illustrations utilising several “musical beasts” and constellation charts to demonstrate the content of improvised imaginary pieces.

“SPECULATIVE MACHINES” Diagrams

Speculative blueprint for the “Ecophone” concept, Nov 2018

Notebook sketches, all A4

During this period, I produced some speculative diagrams to explore the functioning of machines alongside organisms, as well as where the two could overlap. These included the “Ecophone” concept, a small garden ecosystem that would be retrofitted with electric and analogue musical instruments alongside organic components such as flowers, fungi and ponds.

“NOISE MACHINE” concept and experiments

Photo of the “Noise Machine” experiment, March 2019

Concept for “Street Virus” public performance and design for the “Noise Machine”, Feb 2019

Experimental construction of a “Noise Machine”, based on speculative drawings, was intended to combine organic and electronic components into one machine capable of producing spontaneous noise eruptions.

HOTEL-KLAVIER

hotelexhib — *“Hotel-Klavier” in exhibition space, Kingston* *University*

3:17 min, digital sound file (.mp3) & sound installation
May 2019
Exhibited 1-9 June 2019

“Below us, for the first time, we can see the jungle… and then we descended through the clouds.”
“Hotel-Klavier” explores an imaginary, simulated space after the end, a vestige of human habitation coming into view from an overgrown thicket of wilderness. As the piece unfolds, we are invited to see the collapse of the structure all around us as civilisation returns to nature.

Exhibited as part of the Level 6 Degree show at Kingston University, 1-9 June 2019.

STATION #1

2:38 min, digital audio file (.mp3)
September 2017
contains sample of a field study recorded in June 2017

Digitally manipulated musical performance taken from recording of radio station, utilising phasing across the stereo channels to simulate space. The piece can be looped in order to function in the context of a performance piece making use of audio samples.

HOWLIN’

0:59 min, digital audio file (.mp3)
September 2017
contains sample of a field study recorded in September 2017

Digitally manipulated music performance taken from recording of a street busker, using several digital delays to multiply the voice. The delay signals are panned across the stereo channels to simulate space.