Our first featured artist is the true multi-media artist Somfay.
Hailing from Ontario, Canada, Somfay creates analog and digital work on HEN and fx(hash) full of color and change.
Repetition, patterns, feedback loops, modular synthesis, and oscillators are somfay’s toolkit and we all are invited to engage in both small and large displays of their work.
Overtaking and hypnotizing, Somfay’s work draws the audience in for a new experience with each new piece.
Communion
Aurora at Mount St. Matrice
On a Rolling Sea
Aurora at Lake Fire
Thoughts from Somfay on their work:
I take a look in my rearview mirror to November 24th, 2021 - the date when I first released a piece on fxhash. Only one day prior to this - on the 23rd - I began to experiment with Hydra (a modular, livecoding, video synthesis environment developed by Olivia Jack). Having not coded anything beyond html and css since high school - I graduated in '04 - I had very little idea about what I was doing at first. I was very rusty - and certainly still am - but the logic of Hydra began to make sense to me, the further I began to experiment with it. What Hydra’s environment offers is a workflow quite similar to what I am used to encountering when I make music and video, using hardware - both vintage, and of the present day - as my primary tools. All of the deeper and more complex aspects of the code are packaged inside of modules that can plug into one another in very interesting and unpredictable ways. It is like using a modular synthesizer in a system, as opposed to designing and building each module from the ground up. As I became more familiar with these modules, and their capabilities, I began to experiment and push them further to see what they would do as they interact with one another. I began to notice that the modules I was choosing to use in my pieces - usually modulations involving Perlin noise, scaling, hue shifting, and feedback loops - could create very natural looking patterns and flows. Having lived within natural contexts for the duration of my life thus far, I have spent much time observing Nature’s ways and designs; always absorbing and learning as much as I can - studying by observation, and learning the basic physics behind these beautiful phenomena. Both within Hydra, and with ancient video processing equipment, I find that I tend to guide each piece toward a very natural look and feel, even if the context of the piece is entirely alien and artificial. In my visual art - and especially my music - I like to introduce imperfections deliberately. I prefer that things look and sound as if they were born rather than synthesized; or perhaps as if they were born as a hybrid of organic and artificial. As I dive deeper within Hydra, I continue to discover ways in which I can introduce these imperfections in visually captivating and entrancing ways. Although the forms in these pieces are deterministic, they can be made to appear as if they came about in a natural manner. The ripples of wind on water or through trees; of clouds forming and decaying in the sky; the fluctuating and magnetically teased hair of the aurora; the perfectly imperfect position of celestial bodies throughout the night sky… All of these things, and so many more, are so much a part of me that I cannot escape them in any of my work. All I must do is practice, and trust that something will emerge from these deeply embedded biases; and sure enough as the sun rises, something always emerges. As I enter the blank canvas before each piece forms, I know nothing of what will arrive on screen. Even if I have an idea I want to try, that idea inevitably serves only as a seed from which serendipity arises. I bring with me only a glass of cool water and a quiet mind; what comes next is always a dance with the unknown.