Brad Zeffren

I’ve always been fascinated by the balance between control and chaos in creative work. Recently, I had the opportunity to explore this when creating my first audio-visual installation for the “Hall Pass” group show at Julia Martin Gallery in Nashville. This project pushed me far outside my comfort zone, combining video processing, generative music, and controlled randomness in ways that were new to me. What I discovered was that embracing uncertainty within boundaries can lead to creative breakthroughs that wouldn’t be possible through more traditional approaches.

Who is your Hall Pass?

This was the prompt that all the artists in the show were given… who is that one unattainable crush that you would throw it all away for in a dramatic, teenage melodrama kind of way? For me that was the character Audrey Horne, played by Sherilyn Fenn in the original Twin Peaks series.

My project was called “Daydreams of Audrey,” and it was made by layering processed video clips from the original Twin Peaks series that featured the character Audrey Horne. I also took Audrey’s Dance from the original soundtrack and remixed it into dozens of sound clips. This was the track that played in her iconic dancing scene in the RR diner. When each video clip would play, it would also launch one of these remixed music clips. All the clips were around 7 seconds long, and would loop repeatedly as they slowly faded out over around 30 seconds. There were three channels of these audio/visual clips all staggered apart by 2 repetitions, so every 2 loops (14 seconds) a new clip would launch in whichever channel had just finished playing. The channels were arranged left, center, and right and corresponded to the visual composition of each clip. Here’s a quick demo of how the clip launching works.

The initial inspiration for the project was Brian Eno’s Discrete Music, where synthesizer melodies are recorded onto tape loops that slowly decay and fade over time, creating a mosaic of melodies. I have loved this piece of music for many years, and I wanted to try to apply this approach to video clips.

My main tool for building this was Ableton Live setup with a suite of video processing tools called Ebosuite that let’s you work with video signals just like audio, with samplers and effects processing and routing. Ebosuite is brilliant, but I wasn’t able to find anything like a video delay looper that would let me use the regeneration decay like an analog tape loop. To get around this I used the ISF Shader tools in Ebosuite to create a visual decay effect chain that imitated how the degeneration of tape loops felt to me. The effect intensity was controlled through clip automation and increased over the 30 second decay period for each clip. When the clip finally faded out, the channel effects reset and the next clip in that channel would begin. The result was three layers of a young Sherilyn Fenn (the actress who played Audrey Horne) that were continuously re-combining into novel combinations of video and music. This then played on an infinite loop on a CRT television in the gallery.

Chaos breaks you out of habitual creative patterns

This is a work of generative art, meaning every time Daydreams of Audrey plays, it’s a little bit different. The individual clips are the same but the combinations and sequencing are constantly changing creating new combinations. The key to creating these infinite variations is Ableton Live’s Follow Actions feature. Each video clip was programmed with specific rules that determined which clip would play next in the sequence. In this case the next clip is chosen at random from all the clips that are in the same channel as the currently playing clip. This randomization, combined with the staggered timing across the three channels, meant that the combinations of video and audio clips were constantly shifting and recombining in unexpected ways. The system became a generative instrument, capable of creating an endless stream of unique audio-visual compositions that I could never have manually arranged.

Controlled randomization offers a powerful antidote to creative block. When we rely solely on our conscious decisions, we often fall into familiar patterns or get stuck trying to make the perfect choice. But by building systems that incorporate randomness within constraints, we create a space where the unexpected can emerge while still maintaining coherence. The system becomes a collaborator that can surprise us with combinations we wouldn’t have considered, pushing our work in directions that break free from our habitual thinking. Instead of staring at a blank canvas wondering what to create next, we can focus on designing the rules and boundaries that will generate infinite possibilities.

Creating cohesive building blocks for unpredictable artistic outcomes

You can’t just throw a bunch of stuff together randomly and expect good results. Once I had a good amount of clips prepared, I grouped them into left, center, and right channels based on the visual composition of each clip. This way there would only ever be one clip playing at a time in any part of the screen. This helped make sure that the overall image was mostly balanced. For the music, since all of the samples came from the same original track, they were in the same key and tempo. I had to be careful about filtering out much of the bass from each of the audio samples, so that when two or three would play at the same time it wouldn’t turn the overall mix to mud. Doing this also meant that more chords could be combined without making a mess.

This curation of elements that work together while still allowing for spontaneous combinations is really just the art of sampling in music production applied to audio/visual media.The magic happens when these building blocks come together in unexpected ways, creating something entirely new while maintaining a cohesive artistic identity.

Using boundaries and rules to expand your creative universe

Sometimes powerful creative breakthroughs come from self-imposed limitations. When Peter Gabriel was recording his third solo album, aka Melt (love this record!) in 1980, he told drummer Phil Collins that cymbals were forbidden on the record. This constraint forced Collins to change his approach to the drums, leading to the famous “gated reverb” sound on the track Intruder.

This signature sound would go on to define much of 80s music, including Collins’ own iconic drum break on In the Air Tonight. What started as a limitation became a catalyst for innovation, pushing both musicians to explore new sonic territories they might never have discovered otherwise.

In creating Daydreams of Audrey, I gave myself my own kind of creative constraints. Brian Eno’s Discrete Music used the limitations of tape loops and their natural decay as a core compositional element. My limitation was that I had to translate that basic idea into a video. This meant the clips needed to be a certain length, and take a certain amount of time to gradually decay. While I couldn’t exactly replicate Eno’s analog process with digital video, using it as a guiding principle led me to discover new possibilities within the chosen tools at hand. It also made it very clear things that I wasn’t going to do, which in an age of infinite choice is arguable more important than anything else. The challenge of translating tape decay into video effects pushed me to explore shader programming and automation in ways I hadn’t before. These self-imposed boundaries of mimicking the behavior of a completely different medium gave me a sense of focus and coherence while still allowing for endless variation.