Michael Denton and Anna McCrickard formed Overlap in 1999. The duo create music and electronic art, from slow-shifting “transitional paintings” to live VJ sets, audiovisual performances and installations. Inspired by landscape in all its forms, they work by adding and removing layers, blending opportunism with systematised chance. Their melodic, minimalist music is made to accompany seamlessly looped imagery, and they describe the result as “wallpaper with conceits”: endlessly evolving visual fields with no fixed beginning or end. Michael Denton - Overlap.
How would you describe your artist practice?
We prefer talking about our 'process' rather than our 'practice' - sounds more like a creative life and less like a law firm. 'Practice' continues that obsession with turning every human activity into a certified career. As musicians and visual artists we do repeat actions over and over, so 'process' describes the daily rhythm of tweaking frequencies, rendering visuals, experimenting with loops, and seeing how sight and sound alter one another. It’s a commitment to the craft with a lot of circling till a point of convergence is right.
We have been through many permutations of ourselves whether developing visual content to accompany well known DJ's or designing 20 second artworks for the Crypto Art market, but the process is rarely direct.
The contrast between how the 'art world' and the 'music industry' operate is fascinating, especially since they are often dealing with the same raw materials: creativity, sound, and vision. We have had to navigate the completely different expectations of those two worlds. The Art World with its obsessive institutional and intellectual framing, amplifying scarcity, and the Music Industry's fast-paced, commercially driven market. I guess it comes down to different selling structures, but maybe the music industry relies on movements developing from the ground up and the art world works from the top down. Technology and its possibilities offer so many other choices for future experiences in peoples' lives. Transitional 'paintings,' with time as a dimension and music as a layer are a big part of our process, but there are so many options within digital culture.
How are you using technology in a more nostalgic way?
Nostalgia or the atmosphere of the past might be a necessary response to the harshness of the present. There's a powerful magic from the past - a miraculousness of how things panned out, that shapes us going forward.
We don't actually use technology in a nostalgic, but we do use old tricks and tech mixed with anything that works. No one dismisses a 35-year-old synthesizer sound, or a 1940s microphone; they recognize their unique, enduring value. Yet in contemporary digital art, hardware and software go from being the latest trend, to forgotten.
The art world tends to fall into two camps: those who dislike technology entirely, and those who embrace it but trap themselves into thinking art must employ only the newest technology.
My old lecturer at art school, David Hall ('father of British video art'), was always talking about the way different equipment effects outcome with creative processes, and it is very easy to loose sight of what it was you were trying to achieve
Can you tell us more about layering in your process and how that works?
Everything we do involves layering. It roots back to traditional techniques like screen printing and multi-track audio recording, combining elements either into sequential, collage-like arrangement or a polyphonic, simultaneous layering. Digitally, we use video keying constantly within Resolume (a now fairly ancient but lovely software) in our live VJ mixing, as well as in software like Adobe Premiere and After Effects. Keying throws up highly unpredictable image configurations.
Layering works particularly well with the fractal nature of trees and branches, which we tend to experience appearing in front of one another in real landscape, with layers of branches forming an incomprehensibly detailed, complex arrangement. Keying allows us to play with that organic density.
Similarly, layering in music is an inherently powerful creative tool. It introduces unlikely, subtle textures that you can't easily predict, like mixing a subsonic bass frequency with a mid-tone to completely transform its character and its relationship to other sounds. Ultimately, system based layering reveals possibilities we wouldn't have imagined, mirroring that paradoxical mix of authenticity and familiarity that the real world surprises us with.
What interests you about working with systems?
Systems throw up opportunities, create possibilities and new combinations. Infinite mixing of an ever increasing bank of components is very much what we do. So by by using them we find aesthetics and ideas that we would never have thought of. Often we go back with this new knowledge and try to reverse engineer an outcome - and when we do - it doesn't work. But we see that as a positive thing. It proves there is a certain alchemy that can only happen once, like a joke that loses its edge if you keep repeating it. Another plus with adopting systems is we're less invested in the initial process, so perhaps able to be more objective, with the very tricky process of self-editing.
What do you want the viewer to feel when they look at your work?
Evocation rather than received literal representation. Seamless loops become 'durationless' - and with repetition, a carousel effect takes over the viewer's perception. Getting the balance right with loops within loops and the final amount of content is critical to how an audience will experience our art. So that's when looking to landscape traditions and the underlying logic of the natural world helps clarify the way we finish pieces.
We want our artworks to feel 'right' because they align with natural physics, such as textures falling downward like rain or snow, rather than defying gravity and rising from the ground. To touch that emotional connection we all have with Landscape in all its forms, we use distillation and abstraction as a sensory trigger. Hopefully sparking the viewer's imagination and leaving them with a genuine, emotional connection to our imagery and music.
