Sanctus is the first part released from Terry Flaxton’s A Digital Requiem which is a series of audio-visual works created for Sedition.
The music for Sanctus was recorded by sonic artist Emily Burridge in Chartres Cathedral, France, and is a sound composition taken from an improvisation by the cellist whilst working in that space. Flaxton visually creates both an exterior and interior space for Burridge’s composition to work within. Here Flaxton alludes to the power of the space where the piece was recorded, through the use of images of trees whose forms are echoed in the architecture of the Corinthian columns of Chartres. This counterpoint, interior space and exterior space, analogue space and digital space, manufactured and natural space are woven together in Sanctus as an interconnecting practice which speaks about the relationship of the analogue and the digital at this point in time, and their future relationship to the quantum age. Recent quantum work proposes that instead of being eternally real, the world comes into being and goes out of being between every moment produced in time/space. The eternal underlying evidence of the presence of the ‘sanctus’ or spirit of sanctuary is what Flaxton’s work alludes to.
Further pieces in A Digital Requiem will be collaborations with different sonic artists from traditional instrumentalists to electronic composers. As a whole Flaxton's Requiem aims to anticipate what is to come in the quantum age.
