Strangeloop's Latest Visual Spectacle Will Take You Outside of Time And Space

OMNILITH .2 /// MOOGFEST INSTALLATION from StrangeLoop on Vimeo.

All images by Jim Glaze

A bit off the beaten path at Moogfest sits a theater called Altamont. Festival goers pass through its front door, at which point they're hit by amorphous electronic sounds emanating from within. Passing through another door, attendees hook a right, then a left, all the while the volume grows. Suddnely, they find themselves in a dark room face-to-face with David Wexler's Omnilith .2, an installation inspired by the iconic monolith in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

With Omnilith .2, Wexler (aka Strangeloop) creates a 30-minute loop of flickering, warped visuals, bent by implementing several mirrors in a series of kaleidoscopic patterns. As Wexler noted in a chat at Moogfest, each of Omnilith .2's visuals are composed of several segments of slightly different configurations. There are some randomized parameters within the system, so it changes in a few different respects over the course of its 30-minute loop.

Wexler, along with collaborator John King (aka Timeboy)—who helped tweak Omnilith .2—also put together Flying Lotus's futuristic series of holographic visuals for his Moogfest performance. Anyone there would say that it was one of the festival's most mind-expanding moments. Wexler took some time to talk about Omnilith .2 with The Creators Project, and what effects he hopes to induce in its viewers.

The Creators Project: At Moogfest, you're exhibiting the Omnilith .2 audio-visual installation, but you also did the visuals for Flying Lotus's show, which was really amazing in its holographic presentation. Both are great for those looking to feed their heads in a psychedelic way.

David Wexler: It's funny because I kind of founded my career on discussing psychedelics and jumping off from Terence McKenna and other people that always inspired me. And one of my mission statements was to make convincing, meaningful, contemporary psychedelic culture, but now I've kind of distanced myself because I don't want to be pigeon-holed.

Do you have a descriptor that you like to use now?

I don't know, I can say what I'm interested in as far as what I explore through visuals, like patterns and self-similarity in nature and technology, which I think is almost psychedelic enough. I realized that I didn't need to be smoking DMT to see these patterns in the world between visuals and sound. I'm definitely inspired by fractals—that's the big joke amongst my friends.

What is it about fractals that influence the Flying Lotus visuals, or even the Omnilith .2 installation?

I think that everything is kind of fractal, but there are a million types that you can observe. Once you start researching the math behind fractals, you start seeing them everywhere. They've really influenced the way I work. It's that self-similarity in the universe of how something on one level can resemble something on another level, both in scale and in a million other ways.

This stuff underlies everything that I do, including Omnilith .2. What that installation is doing in the center is it's iterating patterns of light. There is some three-dimensionality because it's taking this one pattern of light and making self-similar duplicates using the mirrors.

Were you influenced by early holography like Pepper's Ghost?

Yeah, it's totally similar to that, and you could say that it's the same illusion, but it's just a different configuration. The way I thought about it is that it's a kaleidoscope, but you're kind of positioning the kaleidoscope in a different way—you're looking into it from the side with an opening. I also added a little bit of haze to the light to make the light have more three-dimensionality. I'd have added more haze, but we set off the fire alarm on the first day of Moogfeset. With more haze, the light refracts throughout the room in all of these crazy ways.

There is a red, rotating cloud at one point in the installation. How was that created?

Everything in the installation is real-time, so they're generative forms that I produced that are basically listening to the music or sound design. It's basically line work but all effected in different ways.

Who did the sound design?

Standing Wave. I brought him aboard at the last minute. He's a collaborator of graphic designer/musician Beeple who's on Brainfeeder. He designed quite a bit of the Flying Lotus show. I just asked him if I could use some of his stuff. I did some sound design, but it's mostly Standing Wave.

Sound design can often be an afterthought in entertainment and even in the art world. But, with Omnilith .2, the sound combined with the visuals manages to place the viewer in another reality, if only for a moment.

That was the hope. I've seen so many installations from artists I respect, both online and in Europe, where it's both sound design and visuals. I wanted to do something like that, where immediately upon walking in it's challenging and maybe even confrontational, too. If you're not into it, you'll leave, but if you're into it it will take you into a new audio-visual space, which is hard to do for a lot of the live music shows that I work on. People seem to stay in there a long time, and that's cool. Luckily, it didn't scare too many people off.

One day I was tweaking some stuff, and then I heard some flute playing, and I was like, “What is going on?” Someone had just brought in this stool, sat down, and started playing the flute. It was a nice older gentleman who was just jamming with this machine. It was really interesting to see the installation inspire something like that.

Absolutely. The effect that Omnilith .2 produces reminds me of Coil's Time Machines. Each of its four electronic drone tracks are based on the chemical formulas of certain psychedelics, and are designed to produce “temporal slips.” In other words, make the listener time travel. There's something similar going on with Omnilith .2.

There is something in music where you do time travel in a weird kind of way. If I listen to Radiohead, it's not just that I like a song, but suddenly I'm 14 years old again listening to OK Computer for the first time, and experiencing all of the feelings and time associated with that. Obviously, we're associative animals, but I think there's something to that.

For more of Strangeloop's work see his website here: http://www.strangelooptv.com/

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