Open Air by Chris Caines - Artists Talk - December 3rd, 2011
I went to the Open AirArtists Talk today to hear video artist Chris Caines speak about his current exhibition at the Mosman Art Gallery, which is part of the Festival of Mosman. The work is comprised of a video installation, in The Cube at the gallery, and also a locative iphone application, "Open Air - Locative Audio Essay" which you can view and listen to whilst walking along the path at Sirius Cove, to see the views from the Artists Cove. (I've also used the app at home, so if you're not in Sydney, then you can try it remotely too, but obviously the locative parts won't be the same.)
Once you enter The Cube, the videos and audio starts playing. The videos are displayed in a gallery case, so the viewer can get an intimate view of the moving images by looking down into the case. The Light is amazing, and the colours so rich and vibrant, even with the subtle, delicate blends as Caines adjusts the video by looking forwards and backwards in Time - into the Past and into the Future - to create his video paintings. I think he has captured the light of the works of the Masters in this piece. There are twelve images displayed, which shift throughout time, traveling from the country to the city, as the viewer sees glimpses of both man-made and natural scenes being combined into a modern art work.
There's a soundtrack playing whilst you watch the videos - made from a collection of field recordings from the sites where the images and videos were originally recorded. The effect of listening to the soundscape and gazing on the video panels finding fragments of reality and images in them is quite mesmerizing and reminds me of watching shapes form whilst watching the clouds go by. I felt so relaxed after watching the videos - it's almost like waking up after a dream where you've been watching colours and shapes drift around - there's definitely a dream-like feeling to the work. Footage was recorded over a five year period, and covers the Beauty of the Australian landscape and city-scape. The overall work is stunning - the light and clarity of the video is something to behold. I took a few video clips and photos, below, which don't obviously do the work justice, but are for documentation purposes - you really need to see the work in situ to appreciate its true beauty. Thank you to the Gallery and Festival for including video art in this year's programme.
Open Air exhibition is a multimodal mediation by Chris Caines on the tradition of landscape as a subject of artists in Australia from 19th century painting to the media arts of the present day. The Open Air project includes a video installation in the Gallery space and a locative audio essay iPhone app for the Curlew Camp Artist's Trail at Little Sirius Cove.
You can find the "Open Air - Locative Audio Essay" app in the iTunes app store. Produced in partnership with the Centre for Media Arts Innovation at UTS.
Exhibition launch : Thursday 27th October 2011 @ 6:30pm by Councillor Anne Connon, Mayor of Mosman. RSVP by Tuesday 25th October - call 9978 4095
Open Air Exhibition continues from Friday 28 October – Saturday 31 December, 10:00AM – 5:00PM
Mosman Art Gallery, Corner Art Gallery Way and Myahgah Road, Mosman
Chris will create a video installation within using the romantic ideas of the Plein Air tradition as a starting point. These video and audio pieces will be aural and imagistic fictions that imagine possible Australia's and alternate histories of art and nation that spring from the crucial fulcrum of events unfolding in the late 19th century to which the images produced in these locations are central.
The video work will be linked to a site specific GPS iPhone application which can be viewed at Sirius Cove. Together, Chris' video installation and iPhone application will create a strong sense of place and form a link between the Gallery and Sirius Cove, highlighting this important part of Mosman's rich cultural heritage.
Finally it’s happening, the 5th edition is now live!
From the 1st of December till the 5th, this five day videoart extravaganza will screen around 150 experimental, underground and obscure videos from more than 125 independent artists from all over the world.
Videoctober is a collection of experimental audiovisual art. The aim of the program is to give an accurate sample of contemporary videoculture while stressing the all-time significance and power of imagination.
With video's from
1. Sinan Büyükbas
2. Theo Tagholm
3. Candas Sisman
4. Reza Dolatabadi
5. Dylan Blythin
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.
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...
Expanded Cinema is an online platform for experimental film, early video, and sound-based, durational work. All of the material is being curated from available media online, emphasizing an overlooked facet of the archival function of new media.
I wanted to find out more about this artform and technique, so I googled (without much luck, due to googling the wrong things) and asked the Sarai reader list and received lots of helpful information from many people. after reading about it, it reminds me a bit of the multi-media of a few hundred years ago. multiple paintings / panels on scrolls are read and music played whilst they're read, so there's a mixture of images, music, text, written / spoken word. the artists travel to different villages - equivalent to the communication methods / networks of today transmitting the multimedia messages & works. originally the works were made on cloth using vegetable based paints but these days modern paints are used and most works are done on paper. I hope the traditional methods are not lost completely! the style of painting comes from Orissa and West Bengal. modern artists use both traditional, classical topics as well as current topics & stories - they are trying out new variations of the art too, to keep the method alive and to learn new techniques & skills.
looking for digital arts, new media & urban research projects or exhibitions in mumbai - I'm only here for 2 weekends so might not make it to any festivals. here's some I found so far - some are past projects & some are not strictly mumbai based but I came across them whilst following links for mumbai related items
Horse Bazaar in association with Melbourne Fringe & Film Victoria presents DIGITAL FRINGE 08
1's & 0's in your eyes. Digital Fringe pixels will catch your eyeballs somewhere this festival season. Digital Fringe is the digital arts arm of The AGE 2008 Melbourne Fringe Festival. Digital art from all over the world will be streaming into all sorts of nooks and crannies, across the Melbourne, Victoria & the world. See international emerging artists in your local pub, library, or shops. Have your eyeballs hijacked by MPU's guerilla projections as you wander through the cityscape at night.
Submitted by Malina Hamilton... on Fri, 2007-08-10 19:42
Super Massive headlines the launch of The Mess - a new art-meets-art night for Sydney - this Thursday 16th August at Candy's Apartment.
The Mess
Thursday 16th August
Candy's Apartment
22 Bayswater Rd, Kings Cross, Sydney
Super Massive (Headline)
Great Apes
Stopwatch
Champagne Shoes
Doors open 8pm. $10-
THE MESS..
On Thursday 16th August Candy's Apartment hosts the launch of THE MESS, a monthly event to be held at Candy’s Apartment in Kings Cross in celebration of great local music, art, fashion & culture.
Horse Bazaar in association with Melbourne Fringe & Film Victoria presents DIGITAL FRINGE 08
