My fascination with Francisco de Goya’s work started the day I stumbled across Seated Giant at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I was inspired to delve deeper into his work, where I found the Black Paintings.
Goya painted The Black Paintings 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.
At the time, I was experimenting with the idea that digital images are just information, which can shift mediums, when a friend then showed me how to convert image files into sound files.
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 I recalled the Black Paintings. Their darkness, grit, and violence aligned with the noise generated through this process. 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 making the work.
I isolated elements of each painting in Photoshop, exported the images as PNGs with transparent backgrounds, converted the PNGs into sound files, then converted those sound files back into PNGs, producing the white-noise sounds and textures that populate these new images. I then animated the new composition it in After Effects, slowly layering in the white-noise images as the sounds they represent play in the background. The sounds and images are unaltered outside of the conversion process, so what you hear is what you see.