Sound / Music
This link will take you to works that are audio-only.
Video
View my video work here. Most of these involve sound as well.
Writing
If you are tired of looking at pictures and video, follow this link to essays, articles, and poetry.
Photography
Images captured with cameras (primarily digital).
Category-Resistant
This catch-all non-category covers web-based projects, Flash experiments, dance collaborations, and other miscellany.
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The source video for 'Locks' was filmed on a Nikon Coolpix 3200 point-and-shoot digital camera. I used the 'low-resolution movie' setting on the camera to produce a grainy, pixellated image. I took several minutes of television footage and selected a small, incidental portion of a shampoo commercial for use as a repeated image. The purpose of the work is to show how small variations in rhythm, color, and motion can highlight varying perceptual or emotional content in the same source image.
I assembled, edited, and manipulated the found footage in Final Cut Pro. The sound, created in Ableton Live (prior to the footage), provides a strange corollary to the video, emphasizing the dramatic, over-stylized motions of the original actor.
Locks (2009) from Nathan Altice on Vimeo.
'Translation' involves its namesake in several forms: language, image, sound, and even frame rates. It also involved translation in collaboration. The two participants, Nathan Altice and Maria Lourdes De Panbehchi, exchanged a list of words that could be translated into various images. Words like 'tear', 'snow', or 'flag' carry multiple meanings, dependent on context or pronunciation.
We each captured short video clips to 'represent' each word, independent of one another's interpretations, then later combined them on a single screen, captioned by our shared word. The clips are only a second in length, long enough to 'translate' visually, but short enough to force the viewer to neglect certain information.
Translation (2008) from Nathan Altice on Vimeo.
'Errata' is a sound design piece meant to accompany an animation originally created by artist Alexander Stewart. To produce the work, he photocopied a blank sheet of white paper, then photocopied that copy, then that copy, and so on, until the machine naturally began to introduce ‘errors’ in the process (i.e., the dark marks you see). By scanning each of the several thousand resulting sheets, Stewart created an animation that tracked the movement of these errors across the page.
Once completed, Stewart asked me to create audio to accompany the animation. In order to stay close to the original spirit of his work, I recorded clips of guitar, piano, and synthesizer through the pinhole microphone on my laptop. The low-quality nature of the microphone introduced its own ‘errors’, such as digital clipping, distortion, background hiss, and feedback. I used the resulting clips as the basis of my sound design, which closely tracks the movements, dispersions, and color shifts of the original animation.
Errata (2004) from Nathan Altice on Vimeo.
More videos are available at my Vimeo site.