There’s a strange moment in this kind of work where you realize you are no longer “making a video.”
You are building a nervous system.
Not metaphorically. Practically. Shot by shot. Second by second. Pulse by pulse.
I started this project thinking I was making a 3-minute experimental video around silence, absence, and emotional amplification.
What I actually made was something closer to a controlled oscillation between two emotional states:
Red silence. Blue silence.
And I didn’t plan it that way at first. It just… revealed itself while I was building.
2/12
It started with silence that wouldn’t stay quiet
There’s a version of silence that feels peaceful.
This wasn’t that.
This was the kind of silence that starts to feel like it is doing something to you.
Like it’s not empty — it’s waiting.
Or worse… withholding.
I had the first ingredient already: a vocal stem from a cover of “The Sounds of Silence,” isolated and slightly uncanny. Just the first verse. It carried this fragile human presence, like a memory trying to hold its shape.
Lab note: I initially treated it as texture. It refused to stay texture. It kept becoming an event.
That was the first clue something else was happening.
3/12
The red problem (or: why emotion doesn’t behave on command)
The Midjourney prompt was simple:
“red on red”
That’s it.
And the outputs came back… uncomfortably alive.
Red hair. Red clothing. Red environments. Human presence that felt too intentional. Too charged. Almost like emotion had decided to incarnate itself as aesthetic identity.
At first I thought it was noise.
Then I realized it was interference.
Not decorative. Not symbolic.
Interference.
Something unspoken trying to surface through form.
Lab note: I stopped trying to “control meaning” at this point. That was a mistake I didn’t repeat.
4/12
blue as absence, not emptiness
The counterweight came in the form of blue spaces.
But not emotional blue in the poetic sense.
More like:
- abandoned tech architecture
- liminal server rooms
- empty transit systems
- vast interiors that feel like something should be happening, but isn’t
Cool. Sterile. Quiet.
No humans. No narrative anchors.
Just infrastructure and distance.
These weren’t “calm scenes.”
They were signal environments where nothing is speaking back.
And that distinction matters.
5/12
the system emerges (and I stop naming it too early)
At some point I stopped thinking in “clips.”
I started thinking in:
Red = interruption
Blue = field
Red = event
Blue = continuity
And then I made the mistake of noticing the rhythm.
6-second red bursts.
10-second blue holds.
Or sometimes two blues for every red.
And suddenly it wasn’t editing anymore.
It was timing perception.
Lab note: this is where the project stopped being visual design and started becoming behavioral structure.
6/12
the audio layer started arguing with the visuals
Then I added sound.
A vocal hit.
A tonal A major drone.
Simple things. But they didn’t stay simple.
The vocal hit behaved like a punctuation mark that didn’t respect grammar. It started landing like interruption, not accent.
The drone did the opposite. It refused to leave. It turned into continuity. A kind of harmonic floor that everything else had to stand on whether it wanted to or not.
So now I had three systems:
Visual oscillation
Audio interruption
Harmonic continuity
None of them agreed on what the “main thing” was.
Which turned out to be perfect.
7/12
Michael Caine enters the system like an external authority
Then I brought in the Michael Caine reading of “The Sounds of Silence” lyrics.
This is where things got interesting.
Because suddenly there was an external voice explaining silence while everything else was demonstrating it.
So now I had:
- External language (Caine)
- Internal response (whisper VO)
- Emotional infrastructure (music)
- Perceptual oscillation (red/blue visuals)
Lab note: I stopped trusting “single meaning” around here. It couldn’t survive the stack.
8/12
two colors of silence (and neither of them behaves)
At some point I stopped calling them scenes.
I started calling them states.
Blue silence is not peace.
It is absence with structure.
Red silence is not chaos.
It is presence without release.
One holds space.
One interrupts space.
And the viewer is never allowed to fully settle into either.
9/12
the mistake of symmetry (and why I almost broke it)
I briefly tried to make everything balanced.
Equal red. Equal blue. Clean ratio logic.
It immediately got worse.
Too readable.
Too calm.
Too explanatory.
So I broke it again:
Blue dominates.
Red interrupts.
Not symmetry.
Oscillation with bias.
Lab note: stability is not the goal. felt instability within control is.
10/12
what the piece actually does (I think)
At some point I stopped asking what it meant.
That question was too slow.
Instead I started noticing what it did.
It doesn’t resolve silence.
It amplifies it.
It turns silence into a system that:
- receives signal
- distorts it
- and returns something emotionally louder than it started
11/12
the uncomfortable realization
There is a moment in watching it where you realize:
Nothing is actually being explained.
But everything feels like it is about to be understood.
That gap — between meaning and arrival — is where the piece lives.
And I think that’s why I kept building it.
Not because I wanted clarity.
Because I wanted to stay inside that gap a little longer than usual.
12/12
closing note (or: why I didn’t try to fix it)
I used to think the goal was to resolve emotional tension into meaning.
Now I’m not so sure.
Maybe the work is not to resolve it.
Maybe the work is to build systems that can hold it without collapsing into explanation.
Red silence.
Blue silence.
Neither of them is the answer.
They are just what happens when meaning starts to move faster than language can keep up.
And I think I’m okay with that.
Steve Teare
video alchemist
TerminallyBored.Monster
Palouse, Washington USA