masterjeebe

2007-06-20T11:03:00.000+01:00

Final Post.

Final mixdown of the audio.

I'm concentrating on dynamics. A musical language of softness (p) and loudness (f) to highlight and express emotion in music. I'm using dips and swells of dynamics to connect the sound with the gestures. Almost like making a shape of the audio levels based on the movement of the gestures.

2007-06-19T19:45:00.001+01:00

I've been working on the titles for my film. Modern visual effects looked inappropriate with the film's aesthetic so I settled on an animated write on of my hand writing. It works well to continue the line into piece.

I changed the colour of the hand lines from pure white. It seemed too strong in tone against the brown / sepia background. I chose a 90% transparent white against the background, making it an off white lighter version of the brown. It's like I'm squashing down the range away from 0-255, making it feel more intimate and cozy.

2007-06-16T15:20:00.000+01:00

I've been getting my publicity material together, for the show website, cinema space leaflet and my own personal business cards.

1) Name:
Phoebe Jeebe
Course:
MA Digital Arts
2) Title:
Are You Listening?
3) Text:
Are You Listening? is a short film that examines unconscious hand gestures, the physical communication that leaks out of us as we speak. Animated hand drawn lines distill their movement to expose the emotions being conveyed. These hands conduct a musical score created from sonic fragments of early films, also embedded with nostalgia, memory and emotion. Listen, what are they telling you?
4) Email:
phoebe (at) phoebejeebe.com
5) Link:
http://www.phoebejeebe.com

2007-06-09T13:22:00.000+01:00

I have been helping the onliners resolve their issues with the space and making the plans in illustrator.

Here is the revised plan for upstairs, as Yasmin needed more space and Ioannis needed walls. Only room G36b has changed

Yasmin is happy.
Maria is happy.
Sarah hasn't responded to say is she is happy or not.
I emailed Su to ask if she would swap with Ioannis but she hasn't responded.
I think Ioannis is happy but he would like to swap with Su. If he does swap he will need walls in his new space.
Otherwise there are no other outstanding issues.

2007-06-09T12:44:00.001+01:00

NEW TECHNICAL SUBMISSION INFO

So I can easily make the DVD for the cinema space I require you all to provide me (Phoebe) with:

1. Your film in an MPEG 2 format.
IE 2 files, an .m2v file for the video and a .aif file for the audio. You make this from final cut pro but choosing export using compressor and selecting mpeg.

2. Your film should be 'top and tailed' with 2 seconds of black.
IE you make the fade in from black and fade out to black within the file of your film.

3. Your film should include title/credit at the start or end
Obviously this is within the 'top and tail' of black.

The reason I want you all to give me an MPEG is because it means I am not resonsible for the compressing of your film. I would hate to make any decisions on how it should look or sound.
Also, DVD Studio Pro can only burn a disk if all the files are in the same format (especially audio). It would take all weekend for me to compress all your films in the same format and I don't have the time.
If you include the black at the top and tail you can make the creative decisions about how fast you want your fade or a cut.
You need to be responible for the audio levels within your own film. Doing an overall audio mix of all the audio of the different films is incompatable with the DVD burning process.

2007-06-07T15:19:00.000+01:00

Essays complete.
first 10 seconds of audio complete and sounding GREAT.
I have decided on 'Are You Listening?' as the name.

Next...
Publicity material. Picture and blurb for cinema space programme
create sequence title for film
finish editing the score
finish rotoscoping the last gesture, then redit.

2007-05-27T13:13:00.000+01:00

I have discovered some wonderful animation and music.

http://brainwashed.com/sotl/deadtexan/

Make sure you wait and click 'watch movie' to see lovely animated hand playing the piano.

Christina Vantzou makes the visuals and the music is The Dean Texan and Stars of the Lid. It's quiet, atmospheric and delicate. The visuals are hand drawn I suspect using flash. Soft colours. I'm inspired.

2007-05-17T13:40:00.000+01:00

2007-05-16T23:53:00.000+01:00

meeting / space visit 16/5/07

* Room G36 would be perfect for the cinema space.
* Mount projector on the ceiling (there has been one mounted there before).
* Project onto the wall furthest away from the doors (east).
* This would require building a screening wall as the existing wall has a radiator on it and a door to a storage cupboard that staff need access to. We propose building a wall 3 meters long, free standing and all the way to the ceiling, approx 70cm out from the existing wall thus allowing access to the storage cupboard behind the new screening wall. This wall doesn’t obstruct any fire exists.
* The other walls in the space we propose to cover in black A0 size cardboard fastened with bluetack.
* The windows in the locked staffroom will need to be blacked out.
* The window nearest the door can be left open for ventilation and orientation for visitors.

We feel that this is the perfect room for the cinema space because of its relatively small size and low ceiling. All other rooms would need to be shared with other students and therefore create sound / light spill into their space.
As we are 5 students we feel that it is reasonable for us to utilise the whole of room G36.

To do:
1. Make diagram
2. Measure height of room for wall
3. Calculate cardboard requirements
4. Calculate wood requirements for wall
5. Do we need to build the wall, or technicians? If we need to build it, ask Tobias the carpenter how do we do this?
6. Confirm that we can mount a projector from the ceiling. Do we need to do this or does it need to be done for health & safety reasons by the technicians?
7. Confirm that we have permission to build a wall
8. Meeting with onliners to keep them informed

2007-05-10T22:33:00.000+01:00

2007-05-09T20:41:00.000+01:00

suggested plan for projector plinth (DVD player and amplifier on a shelf inside)

2007-05-04T08:27:00.001+01:00

Presentation Feedback

Focus on the tempo of the entire piece.
Experiment with slomo to really expose the gestures.
Repetition is fine, especially if the music develops and is associated with certain gestures.
Match certain gestures with musical themes then develop them over time, as in traditional western classical music structure.
Create a dialog between gestures. Use them in conversation with each other simultaneously in the frame.

The use of nostalgic music has a connection to silent movies, especially the honkey tonk piano. Source more sounds from silent movies.
The silent gaps between samples helps to connect musical motives to specific gestures.
Sourcing the music from dance films adds another level of association to movement of the gestures.

Animating the colour of the background over time adds too much information. The reading of the music and the gesture is enough for the viewer.
The background colour works well in a single constant colour.
Black and white has a purity to it but black has a connection to the void.
Dark brown is somehow more viscous, fills the space and defines the boundaries of the frame.
Experiement with coloured gesture lines, off white to soften it, or a lighter version of the background colour.

I have definitely decided to project it. It looks GREAT large.

2007-04-30T22:49:00.000+01:00

After further colour experiements I have discovered that it would be better if I render my hand animations from flash with alpha channel then I can do more controlled colour manipulations in AFX. BUT! Quicktime 7 doesn’t support alpha channel from Flash and Mac OS Tiger won’t let you install an earlier QT version. BORING.
But I have solved it by exporting a PNG picture sequence from Flash which supports alpha channel. But this is a drag as it isn’t a supported format of FCP where I have been trimming my clips.

I like having the hands as white lines on a solid dark color.
I will do a test with a projector to test how these colours look in situe.
Changing the colour with each gesture is too distracting from the original gesture. I will show an example of this in my presentation.

2007-04-28T14:59:00.000+01:00

I have chronic RSI from rotoscoping. It takes me an hour to do a second. Longer for a two handed frame. My friend Luci suggested paying someone to do some of it for me. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I am aware that plenty of artists employ people to assist them, and always have done. Especially now in the field of digital arts. An artist wants to make some video art but might need someone to stabilize their badly shot footage or make them a DVD for the exhibition. But I feel that as it is drawing and the choosing of the actual frames to be rotoscoped, it is a creative part of the artistic process. But then again, I am running out of time.

After some experiments with colour I am starting to think that the piece works best in white lines on black. Solid colour with lines is too referential to those (damn) IPOD commercials.
And I’m not sure what actual meaning the colour adds to the work. From all my research into colour theory, there are no actual scientific links to specific musical scales or emotions. It’s all just human speculation. Not that my work need to have a scientific basis.

I have sampled some wonderful sounds from an old film called ‘The Red Shoes’. I find single notes from film scores are most useful. Sampling whole sections of music (even single motifs) brings too much of the original along with the sample. I like to use the feeling of the sound, how the note was recorded in that particular time and space, and the emotion it was intended to convey in the film, rather than the ‘tune’ or music itself.

It is interesting that a recording of a sound can capture a feeling of the time in which it was recorded. I suppose the same can be said of film and video. The visual equivalent of the sounds I am recording is early technicolour film.

I am definatly not interested in ‘electronic’ sounds for this work. By that I mean sounds generated from either an analogue or digital oscillator by means of a synthesizer. I feel that sounds created by acoustic instruments (even if they are sampled or recorded by digital means) suit the feeling of the visuals. I do not intend this choice to imply that I find electronic instruments without emotion.

2007-03-24T16:25:00.000Z

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.

2007-03-06T17:43:00.000Z

Oh dear. I had a dream last night that I failed this course.
I guess my subconscious is trying to let me know that I need to do more work on my project.
Problem is that my mac has died (corrupt RAM) and that is where I make sounds. I have ordered a new one and should have it within weeks.
I'm going to do more rotoscoping tonight.
And whenever I have a spare computer minute.

2007-02-16T20:34:00.000Z

I have been rotoscoping more gestures. It is tedious but nescesary.

I am also building a house gaining great skills for building our final show in the summer.

I recently saw the exhibition of singleshot films. I am now rather obsessed with observing how video work is displayed. I am starting to err away from projections unless you can ensure a complete dark space the colours are so washed out. I am thinking that maybe a good quality CRT monitor is better.

I am asking around at the various TV stations I work at so see if they will lend me one for the show.

2007-01-23T15:53:00.000Z

Exhibition

I need to choose between exhibiting my work on my own in a ‘box’ structure, or being part of a group shared cinema space. The advantage of a shared space is pooling resources such as a high quality projector and audio monitors. Also, as a group we can demand more space and better ensure a blacked out and silent environment.

Issues:

1. Summer heat makes small spaces hot and claustrophobic.
2. Sound spillage from other student’s work in the room.
3. Light pollution
4. How to achieve high fidelity audio without being too loud for the others.
5. How to tempt viewers into a ‘box’ space.
6. How to build a ‘box’ structure.
7. Who will build a box structure.

If I were to choose a solo space I have been considering projecting on 3 walls. Possibly all with the same source (by a 3 way video splitter) or perhaps with three different coloured versions of the same master gesture video (all with the same audio, playing at one source to avoid phasing). Syncing the 3 videos is tricky. I need to research the technical possibilities. I also need to see how far the projector needs to be away from the screen and if that fits in my 3m².

2007-01-23T15:47:00.000Z

2007. Things to think about:

How to exhibit the work?
Do I need more raw footage?
How to record better quality/high fidelity sound from old movies?
How to use colour in the piece?

Timetable:
Jan – Feb.
1. Rotoscoping. Try to get enough rotoscoped gestures for whole piece.
Aim for 2 gestures a week minimum.
2. Sourcing emotionally loaded sounds from old films. Nothing instantly recognizable, but things with a generic sonic feeling.
3. Think about options for exhibition.
4. Blog weekly, find a way to add .MOVs to blog.
5. Think about and test uses of colour.

March.
1. Have a definitive exhibition concept. Space? Projection? Audio?
2. Have a final collection of rotoscoped gestures and audio palette.
3. Be at the composing stage of the visuals and audio by Easter.
4. Test projectors for distance and light pollution.

April.
1. Compose the visuals and audio together. Sourcing more footage/sounds if necessary.

May.
1. Write promotional gumph for show catalogue and make promotional images.
2. Finalize exhibition plan, technical requirements, source equipment, book builder if necessary.

June.
1. Write essay due 11.6.07
2. Finalize piece.
3. Burn to DVD
4. Ready to install on 25/6/07

2006-12-06T12:01:00.000Z

MADA2 Assessment:

SUBMISSION DETAILS:

HANDS.mov – sound & vision

This is the prototype of my project ‘Can you hear my feeling?’

It is a loop of 2 gestures repeating 3 times. I have looped it to give the general idea of multiple gestures. The final piece won’t loop like this, it will have many varied gestures speaking to one and other within the frame.

The final piece will be approximately 3-4 minutes in duration and will use colour instead of black and white gestures. I have developed my palette in RGB (see my notebook, page marked with a blue bookmark) but am yet to integrate this palette into the gestures. I intend to use the outlines as an alpha channel as well as rendering ‘filled’ white hands to use as alpha channels to make hands in solid colours. I am interested in experimenting with intersecting the colours as the gestures overlap.

After experimenting with electronic / synthesiser sounds I found that they were too ‘loaded’ with meaning and I didn’t like the way they effected the emotional response of the visuals. I have instead been collecting sounds played on acoustic instruments. I am intentionally sampling them from places that have time and space embedded into the tonal quality of the recording, rather than actually playing and recording the instruments myself. By using these recordings I am intentionally playing with their potential nostalgic effect on the listener.

I am using PROTOOLS to compose the sounds rather than a clock-time MIDI based programme so that the music has a ‘natural’ sense of time. I tried writing in a MIDI sequencer but the music didn’t seem connected to the gestures. PROTOOLS’s timeline makes it easier to arrange the sounds to the gestures, as opposed to the software time grid. There is a balance here though, as a musician, out of time music doesn’t sit well with me. So if the gestures don’t sit with the timing of the music I can send them back to AFTER FX, re-edit, then re-import them back into PROTOOLS.

Notebook – start at blue bookmark

This is a place for me to jot down ideas outside of the computer.
There are some examples of other artist’s work that relates to my project.
I have found the illustrations of the hands helpful for practice drawing. When I draw over the video footage of the gestures, if the hands are in fast motion the footage is blurred between the fields. Having an intimate knowledge of how to draw hands in multiple positions helps fill in the gaps.
Now that I have my technical methodology and workflow in place the details are written in my sketchbook. They are also on my blog.

INTERIM REPORT:

‘Can you hear my feeling?’ is progressing well. I have defined my technical methodology and workflow (see blog or sketchbook for details). Thereby enabling me to be free creatively with the materials I bring to the audio and visual timelines.

My attempts to film people’s gestures failed for two reasons. One was that the filming situation was too staged for my subjects to express the unconscious gestures I was aiming to capture. The other was the quality of the film was too low for me to see the details of the hands in fast motion. I have solved this problem by discovering a wealth of gestural footage from the world of sport. Sports footage is perfect for me as it is a heightened emotional situation and the players are often attempting to communicate with people out of ear shot. I have acquired some close-up material of players that is shot on slow motion cameras. This has the added advantage of being good quality due to the high frame rate. Making it easier to draw over the hands in FLASH. I am currently working on rotoscoping a gesture a week.

I aim for the whole composition to be around 3-4 minutes in duration. Over the next few months I will spend time researching how this will be projected with sound within the exhibition space. This is a vital element to the production of the piece. I don’t like headphones in a gallery situation as I think it is alienating to the audience. The sound is a vital part of my piece so how it is projected needs close consideration. I am currently thinking about an enclosed comfy space with chairs and darkness, perhaps projecting on more than one surface.

I am having second thoughts about my proposed performance of the piece by conducting an orchestra of visual materials, cardboard cutout grids of each frame being ‘played’ by a group changing the cards in time. I think the visual material of the gestures is very delicate and I don’t think it would be clear in such a large (and potentially randomly timed) format. I have not cast aside the idea though; I will just save it for another project.

I was surprised to discover that my synthesiers (where I tend to create my sounds) do not sit well with my gestural material. The tone colour seems too ‘loaded’ with connotations of a certain time. Digital Art as a new medium already has clichés and electronic music is one of them. I definitely do not want my piece to look and sound like club visuals. I hate to admit it but acoustic instruments seem to engage the emotional field better for this project.

I am aiming to have all of my gestures rotoscoped within the next few months at which time I will also have my sound library collated. Concurrently I will be composing vignettes of gestures in AFTER FX and PROTOOLS. The final step is working on the entire timeline as a whole.

My next step in 2007 is to start experimenting with colour. I have defined my palette but haven’t really started to explore how to use it within the piece. On researching the long history of connections between music and colour I have come to the conclusion that no specific colour links to a specific note or chord. I will be experimenting based on my own feelings.

2006-12-04T15:43:00.000Z

In building the prototype of my project I have finalised the technical workflow, thereby enabling me to be free creatively with the materials I bring to the audio and visual timelines.

1. Rotoscope the gestures in FLASH (from video footage) as white splines on black. I find that rather than keyframes at regular intervals the motion is better if I keyframe at key moments in the gestures. This makes the animation of the lines more fluid. I am not tweening the keyframes as the lines are too complex when the hands twist and turn in relation to the camera view. Therefore it is more of a stop frame style and the irregular keyframes draw the emotion out of the gestures and move away from clock time.

2. Take a rendered .MOV of the white on black gesture into AFTER FX. The original football footage was shot in slomo (to get better quality of the fast moving action) so my gestures need to be timesquashed. They look best rendered with motion blur but without field rendering as it blurs the purity of the line.

3. In AFTER FX I use the timeline and layers to create my symphony of gestures. I will use the white lines of the hands as alpha channels to fill with colours from my palette. In FLASH I will render versions of the gestures as white fill shapes to use in AFTER FX to make solid coloured shapes of the hands. Where the gestures intersect I will collide the colours. I will perhaps experiment with the 3D camera to play with the position of the gesture in the frame.

4. I am constantly moving back and forth between AFTER FX and PROTOOLS rather than creating the whole visual timeline before the sound or vice versa. In PROTOOLS I am loading all of my raw sound files into the library. These come from my ever expanding collection of field recordings. I have been collecting sounds from (unrecognizable) film soundtracks as its main function is to heighten emotion in the viewer. In PROTOOLS I can compose these sounds on the timeline while playing my .MOV of gestures. I also record ‘live’ sounds from my electronic musical instruments to the .MOV. This can then be exported back to AFTER FX either as picture, sound or both for me to re-edit the gestures in response to the composed music.

I aim for the whole composition to be around 3-4 minutes in duration. Over the next few months I will spend time researching how this will be projected with sound within the exhibition space. This is a vital element to the production of the piece.

2006-12-04T15:41:00.000Z

I have discovered the work ‘Gesture Co-ordinates' (2006) by Max Kazemzadeh who takes audience gestures and then translates them into digital codes that provide audio visual feedback to the viewer. As the audience moves around the space, their gestures are turned into pixel patterns on a screen which is overlaid with their projected image. This relates to my project in that human gestures are being encoded into a new form. However, in this interactive situation, the viewer cannot help but modify their gestures to ‘produce’ certain effects with the animation. I want to expose unconscious gestures and let the audience perceive their own emotional response from them as with the music I compose. There is sound in this work, however it performs the function of audio wallpaper accessory to the visually encoded material.

Another interesting Kazemzadeh work is 'Dial-logs' where "sound and image are crossed through a file conversion process to explore relational patterns of digital identity.
Quote from http://www.maxkazemzadeh.com/: Mouse and Man (Mickey and Arnold) takes the image of Mickey Mouse and Arnold Swartzenaegger and converts them to individual sound files. And conversely, the digitally recorded words "Mickey" and "Arnold" are converted from two sound files to two separate images. Those images are projected over sillohuettes of the iconic figures where drawings are made using only those digitally converted sound file artifacts that overlap the drawn contour of the figure. Clear audible relationships can be made from the sound to its respective image.

Having not actually heard the sound file it is difficult to comment on this work but I think the idea of turning sound to picture and vice versa is very interesting.

2006-11-13T17:36:00.000Z

My head is so wrapped up in my PGPD and MADA2 essays that things seem to be feeding back into it. This week I saw Charles Atlas and Antony & the Johnsons perform ‘Turning’ at the Barbican. A beautiful interpretation of emotion through sound and sight. Vocal and acoustic music composed by Antony & the Johnsons (some songs from his albums, rearranged and some new material) very much composed and arranged rather than improvised. There is one model per song rotating on a turntable onstage while being filmed by 2 static cameras. The framing is only of the face and shoulders. Charles Atlas then takes this live footage and mixes between the 2 sources as well as taking sections and processing them digitally. I assume that he is using VJAMM or some equivalent. The first time the model looks directly at the camera is very powerful, indeed it is as if the whole audience gasps. The humanity of the subject (that becomes the art object) being so large in scale and close up feels very personal. The models were told not to ‘act’ but to think inwardly and be themselves.

2006-11-09T08:03:00.000Z

I've been researching the relationship between colour and the musical scale. It's a dubious subjective link really.
It was first discussed by Pythagorus ancient Greek philisophers then again in the 1700s by Castel when the ocular harsichord was built. In the 20th century Scriabin composed music with a 'light score' above the music.

In 1938 Charles Blanc-Gatti made an animated film interpretation of the link between colour and the musical scale called Chromophonie

2006-11-01T19:39:00.000Z

The Photophonic Experiment by Pram, Project Dark and Bliss Body at the MAC in Birmingham was an audio-visual spectacular.
http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/aboutus/project_detail.php?sid=1&id=439&page=8
The three groups had custom built musical instruments that created sound by light or electricity. The artists would point lights at screens and there would be a resulting noise (photo-synth). Another machine would spark and the sound would be amplified in differing lengths of tubes to create different pitches (spark-o-phone). There was a theramin player too. This instrument suited the noisy nature of the experiments as it has a complete range (glissando) of frequencies unlike a keyboard that is restricted to a tonal scale. The overall balance of the evening’s music was half noise and half music. This worked very well. It never strayed too long into abstract noise before a ‘musical’ element brought cohesion to the audio chaos. I have been thinking a lot about the difference between noise and music and I think the difference is structure and organisation. A 10k test tone in a studio is 'noise' whereas when it is combined with other instruments and played on varispeed in John Cage's Imaginary Landscape No.1 it is 'music'. Only in my opinion of course, these things are rather subjective.

2006-11-01T19:27:00.000Z

2006-11-01T19:05:00.000Z

I’ve been researching John Cage for my PGPD essay and have been delighted by his outrageously experimental scores of the late 1950s. Winter Music (1957) and Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-8) have very abstract scores with unconventional musical notations. These clusters or lines have specific instructions or rules attached to them but can be interpreted by the performer quite openly. This use of notation to inspire various readings is in direct contrast to traditional Western music notation, which represents a direct representation of sound.
This relates to my project where I’m highlighting the options of different readings of gesture using music. Music can be ‘read’ by the listener in many ways, it is subjective and open, however Western musical notation is a strict language with little space for vagueries and interpretation, except for in the ‘feeling’ or ‘mood’ or tempo. Gestures can also be ‘read’ in many ways.

2006-10-10T14:51:00.000+01:00

Presentation Feedback. The question of interactivity is often raised when critiquing my project. I suppose because it involves hands it seems natural for the viewer to want to control them. I have been thinking about what Ian said about the time consuming and 2D nature of rotoscoping my footage. I felt rather defensive at the time but in retrospect, I feel that I have decided to do it this way due to the connection to the hand. The gesture of drawing connects me with the gestures in the footage, enabling me to then to channel it to the music I compose.

Steve Reich Birthday celebration, Barbican & St Lukes London.
Incredible. I attended concerts of both his early tape manipulation experiments ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ & ‘Come Out’ and his seminal works ‘Drumming’, ‘Phases’ & ‘Different Trains’. Included in the programme were relevant music like 12th century vocal pieces by Pérotin, contemporary reworkings of Reich by Coldcut and DJ Shadow and video version of ‘Phases’ by David Cossin.
I had an epiphany about Reich’s music during ‘Four Organs’. There were 5 musicians: 4 organs and one man on two maracas holding time like a metronome. This was the only constant rhythm. The organs played a series of notes and chords, sometimes in unison sometimes not. All the notes they played were from the one chord extended over many octaves. This acted as a constant tonal palette so all notes whenever played together sounded harmonious, some creating matching resonances, some creating a ‘buzz’ or beat frequency (when the 6th or 2nd of the chord were played against the root note).
So while the harmony has a constant tonal palette, the rhythm is broken down and explored. The metre (or beat) is constant in the maracas but there is no time signature or set bar length. The organs play a very structured system but the listener can find no repetitions within it.
This has the potential to sound very disconcerting to the listener but because the tones are harmonious, the rhythmic experiments flow without jarring. This idea is owes to African music.
This idea of a tonal palette could work with the sound palette I have been making for my project and the rhythm can be derived from the movement and passion of the gestures.

2006-10-01T22:02:00.000+01:00

I’ve been rotoscoping my football footage. In the past I have drawn over every 4th frame (at 25fps). I have been experimenting with drawing over irregular frames based on action in original footage. I’m hoping that this will give the animation are more ‘emotive’ rhythm.

Marijke van Warmerdam ‘First Drop’ IKON Gallery.
Interesting subtle film works. My favourite was ‘Dream Machine’ which was a close up of a glass of water slowly being diluted with milk. It was a large 35 mm projection on a wall where the image filled the whole wall. Very visually striking. Other works were projected on hanging screens, which I don’t find as successful. Layla Curtis used the screen for a 2 screen work by projecting on both sides which worked better.

2006-09-25T16:40:00.000+01:00

SUMMER BREAK
I’ve been teaching a month long Beginners TV Graphics course for Al Jazeera in Qatar in the Middle East. Extreme Culture shock and very a challenging teaching assignment. I observed a very different and expressive gestural style of communication from the west, which varied largely between men and women. It seemed much closer to Meditreanian cultures in style.

Week plan:
Draw over football footage.
Experiment in After FX with the white on black keylines.
Create sound palette.
Research cinema exhibition spaces

2006-09-25T16:20:00.000+01:00

AUGUST
I have found a wealth of gestural footage taken from the final of the Champions League. It is the ISO of close ups of the captains of both teams which has been shot at double speed so it can be slowed down without any quality loss. It is incredible to watch these men react to the game as thousands of people are watching and shouting, investing huge amounts of emotional energy and tension in them. The men are Brazilian and French, which are both expressive gestural cultures.
Because the camera is trying to capture the footage as the men run around unpredictably, the camera angle is always moving. This adds a great perspective dimension to the footage, like the viewer is trying to capture the meaning of the gestures, as they would do in communication. The footage I had shot myself had a very static quality, which felt too staged.
I intend to draw over the footage to make line drawings of the gestures.

2006-09-25T16:16:00.000+01:00

JULY
Final show response
Preparing for the 2006 final show was a very beneficial experience. I learned some important lessons. There is very little time so it is important to be organised and have a structured plan. It helps to have your own tools, and if I need to build something that is beyond my own personal skill level, plan for someone to help me.
Such a large open plan space has serious consequences for sound based work. The private view is very crowded so sound gets lost. I don’t think projecting visuals with speakers works in the open space. I don’t feel too good about headphones either. People are reluctant to pick them up as listening with them is a very personal experience. I’m tending towards building an enclosed cinema space with comfortable seating and good sound-proofing. Alex is interested in participating in this and hopefully so are some of the new students. If we pool our resources, we can get great a quality projector, screen and speakers.

2006-05-27T17:20:00.000+01:00

I have been invited to be involved an artists collective run by Gillian Wylde. It is exciting. At them moment we (6 of us) meet monthly and are showing our work. In the future we will be working towards a group show, European exchange programme, cv boot camp, making artist books, 7” singles, websites.

Last night I saw London band The Priscillas http://www.myspace.com/thepriscillas. I am so inspired to be in band again. Sian (the guitarist in Joybabe) and I have some plans. Surf Swamp blues. The performative aspect of dressing up and giving a show is a big part of it for me.

2006-05-27T17:05:00.001+01:00

The Waiting Room by Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry at the Walsall Gallery. Set in a waiting room, the resident artists wrote storyboards whilst they waited for gallery visitors to come and participate as actors. The resulting videos are wonderful. Well shot and lit and convey at strong presence and humanity.

Maria Moreira has asked me to give technical help on her symposium ‘Carte Blanche’ This involves learning how to podcast. It would be good to make a postcast of the 2006 Digital Arts final show.

Maria and I want to a show by Layla Curtis called ‘Polar Wanderings’ http://www.polarwandering.co.uk/ which included prints from her recent residency in Antarctica. The prints (red line on white) represent her journeys at various points on her 3 month voyage. I have been thinking about line and mapping in reference to my project. A line is used to mark a journey. What am I trying to mark out by using line to represent my gestures?

2006-05-14T19:57:00.000+01:00

Vasulka Lab at Vivid in Birmingham. Steina and Woody Vasulka give a one day masterclass in their midi based video manipulations. Steina uses a violin to control the timeline and distortions to prerecorded video. Midi notes are assigned to the notes on the strings of the violin and the open string is assigned to and ‘all off’ midi note. Another work used the midi violin to control a robot with midi notes assigned to different hydrolic movements in the robot. Brian Duffy (electronic musician and artist) gave a demonstration of his manipulated sound making toys.

John Keane exhibition Fifty Seven Hours in the House of Culure at Flowers Gallery. Large paintings taken from video stills from the Beslan Seige. Very powerful images especially as there were subtitle style text on each painting. The images were well chosen and looked filmic in their widescreen format. There was an extra level of opaque paint over the images that gave the effect of the reflection or flare you get from a television which seemed to make the images affect me less. An interesting conversations about the ethics of the images with Alex afterwards.

2006-05-11T14:39:00.000+01:00

Tutorial with Andy
Set a timetable up until summer holidays with weekly deadlines.
Work on a sound palette and a visual palette independently for now.
Source new gestural footage from TV- ITV social trash and sport. Find crowd shots at footaball matches, these gestures hopefully will be less contaminated than the ones I have been filming.

Think about what kind of visual language I want to use.
Look at artists who have used reconstruction, even collage. Paul Klee’s lines.
Think about line. What else can I do with line. Black on white line is very defined. Inside and outside. What am I defining?
Line becomes a symbol and what do I want to say? What am I defining by the line?

Perhaps it is the movement that I am interested in, rather than the outline.
Can this movement be translated in to some other form. spacial? graphical? keyframes? sound?

Form / context / gesture / shape
Make a set of experiments. Is there a definite split between them?

What do I really want to extract from the gestures? This is the question I need to answer.
Then how do I describe this.

What do I want out of the audio?

2006-04-09T19:27:00.000+01:00

Sonic Recycler, a night of reinvented sounds at Watermans. Janek Schaefer made wonderful sonorous music using his multi-armed turntable, readjusting loop points regularly. The sounds were quite abstract but all blended well together making a wall of sound. There was a video to go with it called ‘Covers’ which was a collage of old vinyl LP artwork. Great content but the way it was constructed was rather obvious and cheesy with slow pans and long dissolves. It is always a challenge, how to make moving images from a series of stills.

Another band Tunng was a great new discovery. There combined English folk with electronics, a strong emphasis on vocals and percussion. There were three singers who sometimes sang harmonies but often sang in unison. I don’t quite see the point of three voices singing in unison for a whole song. Unison works so well as a contrast to harmonies. When any instrument plays in unison it highlights the vaguest hint of anyone being off key.

Dan Flavin Retrospective was absolutely wonderful. So interesting how the mind perceives colour and how this changes over time. I had no idea of the temporality his of his work. The exhibition was curated to highlight this, placing contrasting coloured works in subsequent rooms with ‘light spill’ between them.

Steve Reich’s new work has some resonance with my project. I think it’s called Rhythm & Movement. The piece unfortunately includes contemporary dance, however at a certain point the conductor came and joined the dancers and they all kind of danced the conducting together.

2006-03-27T23:02:00.000+01:00

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.

2006-03-21T16:10:00.000Z

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.

2006-03-14T23:20:00.000Z

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???

2006-03-05T10:24:00.000Z

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.

2006-03-04T14:27:00.000Z

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.

2006-03-04T13:57:00.000Z

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.

2006-01-31T23:33:00.000Z

I’ve had a breakthough about my project. I guess it’s the proposal deadline. As my artist friend John Hammersley said “Deadlines are like lifelines, but no one throws you one when you need one”. All this discussion about the final show 2006 has got me thinking about possible performative elements to my work. I’ve been thinking about conducting an orchestra of visuals, people holding up cards that are sliced up bits of the frame in the style of a sports stadium or the recent extravaganza in North Korea.

I see that some LA newagers are selling colour therapy DVDs at http://www.colourcalm.com/. I was interested in the idea of questioning where is the threshold between meaning and meaninglessness (I suspect this is a reaction to my day job making information graphics for TV). But more in conjunction with sound, and minimal changes in frequencies. However, I was worried about the potential dangers of making the visual equivalent of MUZAK. This website puts me off.

2006-01-25T16:14:00.000Z

Flatpack Film Festival, Birmingham Jan 19-22 2006. Presented by 7inch Cinema. Some fantastic and interesting works of cinema. I attended an interesting talk by Esther Leslie called ‘Hollywood Flatlands’ about the connection between early cartooning and the avant-garde, which was later replace by Disney Syrup.
A true highlight was VLADMASTER (http://www.valdmaster.com), short films made as 3D stills designed to be viewed on mass through 1980’s viewmasters. There was a narrated soundtrack that included a sound effect that announced time to change to the next slide. This was such a novel approach to filmmaking as the pieces were very cinematic in feel and pacing but delivered in a completely new way. We watched it at Birmingham’s historic Electric Cinema with our viewmasters pointed to the empty white light of the cinema screen. It was an interesting combination of a private shared experience.
The other highlight was the musical group The Destroyers scored and performed accompaniment to the archival films from the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection. The music was in the genre of Jewish Folk and European Gypsy music whose liveliness and pace suited the footage. I always enjoy live scored and performed soundtracks to films. I once saw Phillip Glass conduct the Phillip Glass Ensemble performing Koyanisquasti live.

2006-01-17T11:18:00.000Z

New year new enthusiasm.
Back from holidays with a few deadlines on the horizon has got me thinking.
I have been looking into the connections between colour and sound. John Gage has led me to the 17th century’s attempted to match the intervals of the musical scale with corresponding colours. However, this was problematic at the time, as Western music was moving away from away from the modes of the ancients towards an even tempered scale. Newton, Kepler and Descartes made graphical representations of the colour-sound scale where Castel made plans for an ocular harpsichord, however it seems that this machine was never built.
I’ve been thinking that I could make movies of the colours of different cultures using these colour-sound scales. I could choose pieces of music that are indicative of non-western cultures and translate them to visual movies using solid colour to represent the intervals used and use edits to represent the rhythm.
What would it look like if it was silent? Would you be able to recognise the culture from the colours?
I would need to be careful to try and be as objective as possible when choosing colours for quartertones from the colour-sound scale, and not be influenced by modern aesthetics and cultural assumptions.

2005-12-07T20:28:00.000Z

Have you seen my algorithm?
Axel’s lecture on net art was very interesting today. So much change over the last 12 years. It is a nice idea of inverse dog years. It hadn’t occurred to me that art of early net art period was concerned with communication structures themselves and that once these were in place as standard, artists moved in other directions. But now it seems obvious.
I see it now as a global movement. The Thing in New York and Berlin, Public Netbase in Vienna, EBOM in Sydney and so many more not-for-profit creative technology organisations around the world. I hadn’t thought of EBOM in this context before, as it was my nerdy friends sharing computers and information to musicians and artists, but now I see that this was a moment in time where new frontiers of digital space were being explored concurrently all over the world.

Then on to see Trevor Wishart give a lecture at LCC. Like all electro acoustic sound/music I hear these days I am left with the feeling of coldness. There were some wonderful sounds, but a lack of ‘musicality’. Such a problematic opinion I know. We didn’t get to listen to ‘Imargo’ in it’s entirety so I guess that had an effect on my opinion.
Someone asked a question about ‘does certain software make certain sounds? For example, Max MSP’. I agree with TW’s answer, that people often go for the easy patch or preset sound and always have. However, I have been thinking about the ‘fashion’ for digital synthesis in sound art. It does have a certain sonic quality that seems more intellectual (and cold) than emotional (and warm). I wonder is this to do with the sound waves themselves? Does altering the harmonics or frequencies of a sound to make a new one that would not occur in the natural world, make it sound cold or less human/natural?

2005-12-02T13:38:00.000Z

2 wonderful days at college. It feels like as a class we have crossed through a boundary and become more connected. Yesterday’s tutorials were wonderful and touching. People exposed themselves, which I find so rarely happens in England. I guess one’s art is always influenced by one’s psyche and personal experiences. I wish I had been more personal in my tutorial. My shy secret is that after many years of prolific creative output in Australia, I have done very little art over the last 5 years since living in London. Taking this course is a result of the decision I made last year to revisit my art practice. It’s strange to have such a line drawn between what I did before and what I’m going to do now. The technology in my field has changed so much and I don’t have access to the huge sound studio I once possessed. It overwhelms me sometimes into inaction.

2005-11-28T19:11:00.000Z

I’ve been thinking about hands and how people express themselves unconsciously while they are speaking.
Hands are very personal, reflecting how they are used over a person’s lifetime.
Some hand signals have specific cultural meanings, often contradictory between cultures.
Where sign language (BSL, Auslan etc) is formal and structured, I want to document emotional sign language.

I would like to make animations of hands moving (maybe then freezing in a position like scissors paper rock) to convey / express emotion. I have experimented with filming friend’s hands while we were chatting but they completely froze as soon as the camera was turned on. I think the next step is to have a controlled filming experiment with volunteers who are comfortable being filmed. Things to consider are using a tripod for a static shot or hand held following the action. Then experiment with tracing in After FX.

2005-11-20T18:46:00.000Z

Get your head out of the surf and back into art.

To Do:

Research colour
Shades of white
Mattes to distort

Screen potentials
Locations

Hands
Sign language

Make sounds
Learn Flash

2005-10-19T11:05:00.000+01:00

Confession. I’m going home to Australia for 3 weeks on Thursday. However, I will be participating online and continuing this blog.

It is my father’s 70th birthday and I have been making a film about his life from photographs. It will be screened (as a surprise) at his party in our local town hall. It’s going to be a big event with the back catalogue of our family life in attendence.

I am feeling very emotional about it. Trawling through old photographs, I have thinking about the trajectory of my father’s life and in turn the trajectories of my own. Cleaning up the scanned images where their life as treasured objects shows itself. Then deciding to leave the torn edges and stains in place.

In the computer I can zoom in on a facial detail on myself then do the same with my brother, father, mother and grandparents. I can compare and make connections, just as I can with the timelines of our lives.

2005-10-15T10:49:00.000+01:00

On reading Victor and Colin’s comments about Product and Process for the MA Forum, it became clear to me why I’m am doing an MA. It is to explore research based practice, which is new and challenging for me.

Meeting with Maria to discuss my project was very daunting and I didn’t feel very articulate on the day. I’ve never felt very articulate about my own work, and in the past, have just produced work, then thought about it afterwards. The process of researching and writing about an idea before I explore the practice is entirely new for me.

However, after speaking with Maria, it helped to focus my thoughts (and make me realise that they are VERY broad) and enable me to write a little. I am much more of a talker than a writer. Her comments in response were helpful, especially with language and structure.

2005-10-11T21:28:00.000+01:00

It’s been a week of Japanese pleasures for me. Watched the film “Howl’s Moving Castle”, fantastically ridiculous hand drawn anime feature. Then researched origami techniques to construct my mo-sette (a rosette in honour of Mo the dog who was recently savaged by an german sheppard).

And finally, saw Ryuichi Sakamoto performing with Alva Noto at the Barbican. This was a superb expression of analogue meets digital. RS played a grand piano while AN processed the piano sounds. He also made digital sounds then fed both sources into some software that triggered visuals. The visuals must have been pre-designed with a colour palette and patterns but were then generated by the attack and possibly frequency/pitch of the audio. The screen was about 11 meters wide by 1 meter tall. A shape I have never seen before. The first piece had a few soft white blobs growing then fading away on a black background. It was so minimal and dramatic. When a very bass note happened the entire screen turned solid red. The whole aesthetic seemed rather Japanese. It made me think about our discussion in class about whether digital culture reflects the specific culture it is created in. I think it does.

2005-10-04T15:37:00.000+01:00

Last night a robot spammed my blog

Well, it seems the disadvantage of using blogger.com is that the huge commercial monolith is a target for spam. I now have a collection of comments that advertise software and services. Disappointing.
However, this has set me off on a few projects:

I’m reworking the song ‘last night a DJ saved my life’ into ‘last night a robot spammed my blog’.

I’m going to try a few experiments to coax the robots to me. I’m going to start a new blog and throw out keywords to see what best summons the robots.
http://botbait.blogspot.com/

2005-09-27T09:41:00.000+01:00

Interesting article on ‘booming sand’ or how sand makes sound:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3204/04-recipe.html
I lurked an MP3 of a squeaky sand sound, kinda like the one you make when you walk across a beach. I think I’ll experiment with this and add it to my ‘sand’ flash movie.

Started the Dreamweaver tutorial and have solved my remote server problems. Linked this blog from the homepage. I plan to expand my site to include my portfolio and new work. I’ve never made a web site before so the learning curve is huge. Coming from broadcast, it’s very strange having a variable frame size.
http://www.phoebejeebe.com

2005-09-24T12:48:00.000+01:00

On Wednesday we had a group class with all Digital Arts students. Everyone introduced themselves and discussed their projects. Such a bunch of interesting people with a wide range of ideas. There are some concurrent themes that run through many of the works. The loudest of these I guess is INTERACTIVITY, the topic of Thursday’s symposium. It seems that there is often an assumption of interactivity in digital art. I think this is ridiculous. To me, ‘digital art’ is the most wide ranging of all art forms as it can use any creation method as well any format of transmission/broadcast/exhibition. But it can still be a ‘closed’ work.

The feedback and suggestions I received from the class about my project made reference to Wolfgang Goethe and John Gage’s work on colour theory and Norman McLaren’s film work where he scratches into the audio track of analogue film.

The interactivity symposium was fantastic. The definition needed to be thrashed out early on as all communication can be thought of as interactive. I thought about when art started to incorporate interactivity and came up with Bertold Brecht ‘Radio Theory’ from the 1920’s in which he proposed the use of the new radio technology for (2 way) communication rather than (1 way) distribution. The 1960’s happenings and the Fluxus movement changed the relationship between artist and audience by pushing the boundaries of ‘what/where is the art?’.
We discussed the value of instructions in digital art. Some strongly opposed opinions. Things keep coming back to language, where there is an assumed level of computer language, there’s no need for instructions.

I spent an exciting show and tell afternoon in the lab with Lousia. I’ve been wrestling with making this blog in html in dreamweaver because I’m determined to learn. But I’m constantly offended by my inability to layout my page tastefully so I’m going to use a pre-formatted blogger page and learn to make websites with flash for something else, like my portfolio and new work. Why reinvent the wheel?

2005-09-20T12:48:00.000+01:00

Discussions about Mashcinema (sic) new forms of cinema using non-linear narratives with Seb Chan of Subase Snarl and The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.
Interview in the Guardian 24/09/05 with Edward Castronova about ‘Synthetic Worlds’, multi player online role-playing games and emotive AI.

2005-09-16T12:47:00.000+01:00

Visited Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970 at the Tate Modern. I felt that the works were absent of the feeling of freedom and new mediums that they would have been created in. Perhaps to do with the curating, or maybe the ‘Tate Modern Experience’ where the space is so heavily loaded with the feeling of 2005. It all felt mixed up and crowded in together. Marcel Broodthaers ‘Boat Painting’ 1973 was an interesting use of rotating slides of close up sections of an old oil painting. It had a similar effect to my flash work Sand 2004. I enjoyed Bruce Nauman ‘Around the Corner Piece’ in which, as the viewer, you are an essential performer in the work.
Open Sound Systems: Alvin Lucier concert at the Tate Modern. Fantastic! Really interesting approach to sound as art / space / science. My favourite was first, by Alvin Lucier ‘In Memoriam of Jon Higgins’ where a constantly ascending synthesised tone was played. A clarinet player would hold constant notes, closely tuned to the tone which would create beat frequencies as the tones collide.

2005-09-14T12:46:00.000+01:00

First day.
Dominance of the visual apparent immediately. MA group refers to art as ‘an image’.
Interesting idea from Andy about a sound only website with no visuals. I would like to explore a website for sound where audio is triggered by colour, not text.
ITRDU are doing research into use of colour.