My love for Francisco de Goya started the day I stumbled across Seated Giant at the MFA in Boston. That moment sent me deeper into his work, where I found the Black Paintings.
Goya painted this body of work directly onto the walls of his villa after an illness took his hearing and, eventually, his life. Something about the intimacy of painting directly on the walls stuck with me.
Around the same time, in Christine Collins’ sophomore projects class, I was experimenting with the idea that digital images are just information, something that can shift mediums. When a friend then showed me how to convert image files into sound files, the first lightbulb was lit.
The sounds my own photographs produced were harsh, grating things that didn’t reflect the work I was making at the time. So I started wondering what kind of images would naturally translate into this abrasive sonic texture? That’s when the second lightbulb lit: the Black Paintings. Their darkness, grit, and emotional violence aligned with the noise generated through this process. And, of course, the connection to Goya’s hearing loss made the transformation feel even more meaningful. So, I gathered the highest-resolution images of the Black Paintings I could find from online archives and began.
I isolated pieces of each painting in Photoshop, exported them as sound files, then converted those sounds back into images, producing the white-noise textures you see in this carousel. I then synced it all up and animated it in After Effects.
The sounds are unaltered outside the process itself, so what you’re hearing is essentially what you’re seeing.