Light Traps

It's all been done before in all sorts of ways you know - by the structuralist/materialist film makers in the '70's, people like Guy Sherwin and Liz Rhodes (not that I'd compare myself to them of course), and using video, the Vasulkas amongst others. Nonetheless, it can be satisfying to discover you've made a video that has the camera in it as an explicit and essential ingredient.
I was attempting to synthesize some audio by pumping it through an LED, and then burning some wood to produce smoke and heat-haze noise in the sonified signal (see a much earlier post below). Of course, there was a breeze and it just drifted either onto me, or in fact anywhere but in between the LED and the lens. But then I noticed this as I was fiddling with the tripod...interference patterns generated by the high speed flicker of the LED heterodyning with the scan rate of the CCD chip in the camera. At least that's the best explanation I can come up with. I ought to (will) try this with a few different cameras, and eventually come up with an installation.

The audio being pumped is itself from light signals - emanations from a shop window on Regent Street (I forget which), which rather oddly, was covered in lacewings...