I had developed RSI from rotoscoping. Ouch!
I’ve seen a lot of shows lately so I’ll do some reviews.

Christian Marclay ‘Crossfire’. Brilliant 4 channel video installation composed of gun scenes from films. Similar to ‘Video Quartet’ in the way excepts combine together to make a new whole. Crossfire, although still very audio centric, isn’t as strong as an audio piece. The way the screens are arranged in a square forces the viewer to take a participatory role as the character being shot. There is nice movement, choreography with the movement between the screens.

‘Luminaries and Visionaries’ at Kinetica Gallery, London. Annimated LED works by Jim Campbell as beautiful abstract human gestures represented in the LED grid. One was abstracted again as shadows behind an opaque architectural black & white picture.
Rob & Nick Carter had a ‘painting’ that was made by exposing cibachrome paper then shining coloured lights on it. It looked like animation because of the colours changing. Beautiful.

Optronica Festival, London. Christian Fennez with Charles Atlas at the IMAX. Terribly disappointing visuals. Predictable loops of archive footage luma-keyed over each other. It was like bad 1980’s rave visuals. Such a shame after his wonderful collaboration ‘Turning’ with Antony & The Johnsons.
More exciting were the support act Semiconductor where the visuals were generated by the sound. Unfortunately the sound was rather abstract electronic noises, and in my opinion, not very musically composed so the whole thing felt a bit cold. The visuals looked great, bright coloured gradient 2½D cubes on solid colour backgrounds ‘growing’ with the music. The second piece worked in the inverse where the lumanence (light levels) of the visuals generated the music. The visuals were black & white images of the sun emitting gas and sunspots (from telescopes) and the electrical staticy sounds worked well together.

Centre for Visual Music, history of colour music talk. Very interesting and informative with plenty of documentation of the early machines. I was particularly inspired by Oskar Fischinger’s the use of a scrolling colour background behind a single object in the foreground. The changing colours in the background had an effect on how you perceived the object. I will try this with the background of my film behind the animated hands.