Chris May "Spirit Chasers"

Hi, I'm Chris May, and welcome to the audio guide for Spirit Chasers.

This work starts with sound, built from a live performance on a generative synthesizer that produces both audio and a visual waveform simultaneously. I record that live output, so from the beginning I'm listening to the sound, but I'm also watching the waveform and shaping it visually because that line work acts like a kind of first sketch. That recording becomes the backbone of the film, the sound and image are born together, from the same source.

That raw signal then moves through a custom generative image pipeline, where the lines get reinterpreted as landscape. A triangular waveform becomes a mesa. A cryptic outline becomes a petroglyphic symbol. A burst of distortion becomes something that starts to feel strangely like a face.

The film moves in three parts, not as a story exactly, but as a progression. From the raw signal of the instrument, toward something that starts to feel like place, and finally toward something that feels like presence. The idea is that if you sit with a landscape long enough, or a frequency long enough, it stops being abstract and starts being inhabited.

What I was after is the idea that the American West isn't just a place you look at, it's a frequency. Something that's been oscillating long before anyone showed up to photograph it. The land has its own pattern, its own memory, and this film is my way of trying to let some of that surface through.