Maria’s tutorial.
Card 1. Most important issue is emotional language expressed through gesture.
Card 2. By observing peoples’ unconscious gestures I will then reinterpret them as music.
Card 3. Why? Because music is a structured language like the spoken word but it is used to express emotion. Conducting is a theme between the gestures and the performance of the music. I have diverged from my original idea that focused on synethesia. I now am focusing on structure and the connecting points between music, language, gesture and conducting.

By looking at communication and how unconscious gestures contribute to meaning being conveyed, I am really looking at the territory of misreading. The interpretation and reinterpretation of communication as it travels from person to person to a musical structure. By placing myself in the coding / recoding position I am highlighting the potential disturbance that exists in all communication.

I have been rotoscoping the footage of gestures I filmed. The straight down the line locked-off camera position seems rather staged. The hands seem too small in the frame. I think I should source some more footage where the framing makes it look more abstract. Hands coming in and out of the frame. I will also need a higher resolution/frame rate as fast movement is leaving the frames blurred and difficult to trace.

Last night I saw Ryoki Ikeda performing ‘C41” and ‘Formula” at the Barbican. I am a long-standing fan of his music. It is pure electronic ranging from structured beats to extreme tones. The two pieces last night were presented with visuals that I found VERY disappointing. They seemed very obvious and dated with a heavy reliance on scrolling numbers, much like the matrix film and badly shot landscapes. The sound was awesome, really loud and physical where he was obviously using frequencies at the edge of human hearing. In the end I closed my eyes to best appreciate the sound. Shame.

Albers & Maholy-Nagy at the Tate Modern on the other hand was great. A little too much to take in one session though. I went with Maria and Janet and it was interesting to see how different work appeals to each of us. Maria was more drawn to the 3D sculptural works where I love the flat geometric things with a limited colour palette. I found a diagram depicting colour and sound intersections that reminded me of the 17th century ones I’ve been looking at for my project.

This morning Radio 4 informed me that today is PYE day, as in 3 of the 14. I had a steak and ale pie for lunch to celebrate.
Andy raised some good points about my project during my tutorial with him.
*Think about framing. Perhaps letting the gestures escape out of frame.
*Observe other body parts during communication.
*Record some disembodied gestures from television.
Also some much needed technical suggestions about filming with video cameras.

After watching ’20 thousand leagues under the sea’ on TV I have a desire to make a light installation. The 1960s submarine had some wonderful instrument panels in it. I have a collection of photos from a TV station in India and a radio telescope in Riga of old fashioned machines that I could make a web based version of the idea with. I’m sure I could make a random sequence of flashing lights in flash. Might have to do a few more chapters of the tutorial first! What I would ultimately like to make is a wall of lights in grid and make them flash on and off in a sequence.

Today I have been teaching some graphic designers from an investment bank how to build their new in-bank Bloomberg style TV station. Is this the future of broadcasting??? Where corporations will all have their own in-house channels???

Early American Computer Animations programme at the NFT as part of Node London. Interesting films by John Whitney, Lillian Schwartz, Pierre Hebert and others. The speaker who introduced the films talked a little bit about the technical process. I didn’t realise that the films were made frame by frame, outputted from the computer then optically printed, taking 3 months to make a 3 minute film. I particularly enjoyed the experiments in perception, where colours and shapes would move and strobe to produce optical illusions.

V& A / onedotzero TRANSMISSIONS. Absolutely heaving Friday night free event at the V & A. I’ve been to a few Friday late events there and they are always fabulous. This one no exception, even if they did run out of beer by 9pm. The brochure was a cleaver piece of graphic design where one side had a map and the other had descriptions of each work. If you held it up to the light both sides traced through to each other, with back-to-front numbers on one side reading through to the other. Nice!

My favourite work was outside in the courtyard by UVA, a giant LED 2001-esque block showing pulsing colours that were triggered by a camera on top as people moved close to it. It also triggered synced-up wonderful bass tones. The speakers were spread very far apart, thus enveloping you in sound as you approached the screen.



Also great, especially in the party context, was Jason Bruges' stunning Visual. A giant flat long table of moving LEDS changed colour as someone held up an object to the camera at the end. There were hoards of people gathered around this work wanting a turn.



D-Fuse’s Brilliant City film was great, visually stunning with great music, however, I would like to see it again in a cinema context. It was exhibited in the Chinese room with very bright lights so the projection screen was quite washed out and there were lots of people and bits of the exhibition in the way.

Tank TV’s Follow Me was a wandering tour with video projection. I didn’t really engage with the content but the method of delivery was clever. A women held a cereal box sized projector with speakers attached that she pointed all over the gallery. I guess there was a small DVD player or ipod in there too.



I couldn’t face the Q to chat with Airside’s alien.

Film shoot 1/3/06.
Filmed myself, Cristina and Moira Allen speaking. I used a black backdrop and dressed them in a black top with the sleeves rolled up so the focus was on their forearms and hands. I needed to take a wide shot to ensure I got all of the gestures. But I did shoot some footage of myself, more of a MCU, as I whispered some personal things when the room was empty.