a few david sylvian songs were the soundtrack for day11's #vlomo09 video. they make the train ride home from work a bit more interesting... these are video paintings - I made the isadora patch file - see attached. it's based on one I made for vlomo08 day 1's video : train ride home. most of my videos seem to end up with a similar theme - drive/ride to work, travel, hotels, some isadora files, some music/arts gigs or festival videos. such is my life I suppose. david sylvian's "secrets of the beehive" album is one of my favourites - it's perfect for when I'm feeling down (as is depeche mode) as I always feel better afterwards. I think it's the male vocal. and piano in sylvian's case.
promise (part 1)
David Sylvian's Promise (the cult of Eurydise) with isadorian footage of the western line express - part 1
Rupert Howe, the amazing & enthusiastic videoblogger is running a video project. he's invited artists & people to create a video based on two videos made by other participants. for my video I wanted to practice using Processing so I wrote a (very basic) program which allowed me to "paint" with one video on top of the other, whilst drawing thin lines on the screen & between the videos as a way to link them together. my inspiration videos were made by Ryanne Hodson and Kevin Buckstiegel.
the inspiration / thoughts I had whilst watching the source videos :
atoms of life remuxed together
codes building blocks
diving into the infinite universe of code & atoms
video painting
interactive - controlled by mouse movements & 2 videos affecting each other (when creating the video, not playing)
lines draw points between the two - connecting them too
initially I used the audio from Kevin's source video but I wasn't sure if he'd made it so wasn't sure how to reference it properly (it was part music & part muffled conversations from what I could tell), then I read some emails about Stan Brakhage on frameworks and remembered the readings / viewings I'd done of his work when I was looking into Len Lye's work, so remembered he used to create videos with no sound as "visual thinking". so I've left the final version having no sound track (not quite a lumiere though) as a homage to his amazing work.
:::
I had some problems uploading the videos to youtube - the drawn lines turned from thin straight lines into aliased dotted lines. the video looked OK if played from my own webserver, but really bad from youtube.
Rupert sent me some conversion tips :
1. save as .divx & upload
2. use the settings below for mp4
Don't upload at 640x480 - upload at 480 x 360
Use the following settings:
H264 encoding
.mp4 not .mov
480x360
Bitrate: 12000 (really!)
Framerate: 29.97
Audio Codec mpeg4aac auto bitrate
Stereo 48000 sample rate
I also tried re-making the video using linewidth=2 (instead of default which is 1) & exporting as divx in QT pro. this looked OK. I ended up using this video for my project submission (well, this video with 10 seconds of black added to the end & no sound, so technically the final one is based on this version..) the final versio came out at 42 seconds duration - which is not 23 but 42 is a good number for life ;)
I took a video from the train on the Wednesday Sydney awoke to the red dust storm and then another on the next day. the videos were taken with my nokia n95 camera, so it lost most of the redness, but you can see that the sky was dustier than the clear Thursday. they're not completely in sync, because I wanted dune day to be slightly ahead of clear day, so you can watch it from left to right and see the scene & colours change as your eye reaches the second panel. I'm not sure if this effect worked as well as I planned though - perhaps I should have lined them up so they were in sync after all.
I always have problems saving the Isadora video files as they always lose video quality and end up with lots of compression artifacts. I tried exporting at 5% rate, but it somehow increased the framerate and sped up the video! so this was saved at 95%.
other videos taken on the day - with my sony camera so the colours show up properly :
This Is Not Art festival 2009
This is Not Art is the parent arts, music festival of experimental and underground arts & music held annually in Newcastle, North of Sydney, Australia. The 2009 festival was held between October 1-5. The festival comprises of various festivals, listed below.
I thought it'd be cool to get a personal projector and project videos onto the ceiling of the train for people to watch during the ride to & from work. have a website where people could suggest videos, or perhaps they tweet them or sms. they could rate them too on the site. I was thinking art or landscapes - trainscapes. but I suppose eventually it'd be overtaken by advertisers or spammers. would be nice for a while though! just look at all this ceiling space doing nothing - apart from the bright lighting in the train, this would be ok for an adhoc screen. 29/04/2009
Electrofringe is now calling for proposals for the 2009 festival. We are looking for creative expressions from artists, sound artists, performers, media makers, digital filmmakers, researchers, cross-artform practitioners, curators, producers, writers, experimenters, enthusiasts and anyone who doesn't fit these boxes.
Electrofringe is a five-day festival of electronic arts and culture held from the 1st - 5th October 2009 in Newcastle, Australia. Electrofringe is part of a group of festivals collected together under the This Is Not Art umbrella. Electrofringe is committed to fostering creative and innovative use and re-use of technology and electronic artforms, while focusing on artistic development and skills exchange.
Narghile is an AV performance project of Brisbane's video & sound artist Lloyd Barrett. Lloyd has also worked using the name Secret Killer of Names / SKON. I googled N4rgh1l3 and found some video works. absolutely amazing! he mentioned he uses Isadora. it's amazing what he gets the program to do - if only I could get it to do half as much I'd be happy!!
this is a video piece submitted for the surface mapping projection at the Queensland Library at the Opening of the "Game On" exhibition (early arcade games & consoles). I went to this exhibition during Christmas holidays - it was great. unfortunately I didn't attend the Opening night as I was interstate. plenty of fathers showing their sons the games they played when younger. visitors were allowed to play the games, and they could read a bit about the history & background of the games. the Japanese 'dating' games was a new one to me!
Narghile v0.01 part 1 : Part one of two. First performance of Narghile's new audio visual processing processy thing. Videos made from still images and DV footage taken by the artists and processed live by Isadora and extra audio processing by Audio mulch and a Chaos Pad.
Solar Circuit Aotearoa New Zealand (SCANZ) is the interCreate Research Centre's major project, a two week residency for artists, producers, writers, theorists and curators will be held in New Plymouth New Zealand from January 26th to February 8th 2009. Project partners are the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Puke Ariki integrated library and museum.
Raranga tangata refers to the weaving together of people, a phrase used to describe the internet and adopted by Sally Jane Norman and Sylvia Nagl in their work. The aim for SCANZ 2009 is to weave an enduring fabric of people and technology, located in this place: Taranaki, Aotearoa New Zealand, Pacific Ocean.
cicada is a collection of artists who work with landscape - urban, natural, constructed and imagined... a combination of results occur, including site-specific installations, performances and interactive pieces... cicada also make other bits of sound+image works for theatre, dance and performance projects... and occational urban gifts of unexpected enlightenment...
Cicada projects have included :
* Mob - an installation exploring the crowd as a discrete organism.
* Saltmilk and other wonders - work resulting from a residency in the West Australian wheat town of Kellerberrin.
* Amensal - an interactive street level installation, a purely negative urban symbiosis.
* Re_Squared - an immersive outdoor audio visual performance celebrating moments of discovered beauty in the city.
