Max Cooper is a well known musician. I however discovered him through his installation at the Barbican “Feel the Sound” installation last year.
Reflections of Being created by electronic musician and audio-visual artist Max Cooper is a window into our inner thoughts. Anonymous answers to the question “What do you want to express that you can’t in everyday life?” are revealed through music, film and text. (barbican.co.uk)
I was reminded by the project when I was searching for projects that explore collective memories that had a feeling of vastness, a feeling that is shared with fellow TCKs when thinking about feeling nostalgic of the environment we left behind due to migration.
Reflecting on this, I spontaneously made connections in my head:
“The thing about being a TCK is we romanticize an entire world because of separation and distance. An entire world intimately hidden within the personal psyche, making us exist alone in this vast mental memory – a microcosm of a distant world.
Max Cooper’s installation: Reflections on Being” embodies this quiet “vastness”. His work of flashing images of humanity, paired with his synth music, feels like a colossal collective story shared between seemingly countless people. The installation takes also into account how our shadows disrupt the projectors revealing the environment and strangers around us, adding to that feeling of mystery.
Change the subject into cross-cultural experiences and identities. How this music video format convey the sense of limbo, distance, or connection, or even loss, as fragments come together and builds a communal picture.”