Processing 0124/1025

...if, say, you had the idea of taking each frame of a movie & directly manipulating it as an array of pixels...which is the approach described in the perfect sense - below - posting requires...then you'd have eventually found some of the web sprawl around Processing. Turns out to be a method that has several examples within that thought-cloud.

Although we are talking QuickTime for Java here (which is what Processing - very sensibly - uses for it's video library) & that really is something of a dog performance-wise. The applet I'm working on will run precisely once & never again until I restart or login/out between runs...

Serious problems (in QTJ) - I'm guessing here.

that mysterious 11th post

...the one that disappeared when firefox crashed. anyway. It's open source! how could that happen... well, I'm a user of pd I know about that (& Max/MSP - which does a good job of dying badly on occasion). Well, my old G4 powerbook is heading for retirement I think & the AMD linux box which was largely a generous gift of parts from stegasaurus is just...fast enough to render movies using the pdp video extensions (hmmm, time to build a custom kernel maybe). Great! I've discovered a rich seam of video/audio stuff that is continually inspiring but pretty quickly exceeds the capabilities of both hardware & software I have to work with. Not that I'm grudgeful.

This is one limitation (sheer CPU speed) I've never bumped into before so that's interesting in itself - old-school ProTools users may remember things like virtual tracks - ways of putting components of your work on hold, so you can keep working & render your stuff on faster equipment.

I rendered my initial cut of extruded snow from a pd/pdp video patch on linux, sending values to Max/MSP on the Mac to create the synchronised audio. Then doing the final thing on iMovie under OSX

I have learned so much about dealing with buggy output files (pdp creates .mov files that QuickTime 7.x cannot read - VLC to the rescue!) & I know that I'm using software for things it was never intended to do.

Reminds in a way of creating electroacoustic music in analogue studios that were built & wired for stereo radio production. Just remember that everything must be re-plugged so that it works for the next user...(because I'm nice that way - not like some people).

The law of the workaround: things may look hopeless but there's always a solution. However, it may involve borrowing cables from the next room & your sanity may not survive the process.

mattstetten

which trail would you choose?

showing in Sound of Failure

Thanks be to Don't Look Gallery. The first cut of 'extruded snow' - 7 minute video will play on a loop in the nice backroom of the gallery (not in the performance night as on the invite).

it makes perfect sense to me but exactly no-one else

A shopping centre carpark after hours. Twilight in a forest. An example: a cold sunny afternoon in the bush, strong wind making the gumtrees roar, whisper, thrash & knock their branches together. This - not so much a distillation of this but a stepping back from it. I wanted to place the lense of the equipment & the computer in between the experience of this & shooting the video & the finished projection.

(added later) Clearer or maybe not: I'm thinking about a distruption of the connection of sound & image. Diagesis - one of those very useful definitions from film/narrative theory (well, a common usage of the term anyway - I must admit I can't remember the originator & should hit the books...).

If the image is disrupted & not 'recognisable' as standing for itself - ie. video of the trees moving in the strong wind (which is what we irrefutably hear) - the situation becomes one of sound versus image. The normally seamless support these provide for each other doesn't work anymore.

What I mean by disruption is to take the video stream & apply some mechanical change to it - say by sorting the pixels in each frame by colour. I am working at a fundamental level of the encoding (the capture & replay technology)...& exploiting this capability to open up a breach in the visual/audio perception of the audience.

This situation is limited to the presentation of this work but it falls into the Dada/Surreal tradition of dissociation. I'd argue that it also works in the tradition of exposing the means of recording & playback.

& this is what we all want: art that exposes a breach in perception & a breach in the media - not the necessity of these but the possibility.

distinction between eyecandy & informative

Googling video installation aesthetics gets you to places like: http://infosthetics.com/. I'm interested, sure - just like with the hard core at generator x. But I wonder about all that input. I have a vast amount of unformed notions about where I, personally, would draw the line about creating visualisations - no matter how pretty (& yes I really do like, value & defend 'pretty'), how clever etc.

Fining down this problem, I think it ends up being that I still have some kind of belief in there being a material/energy that is what animates the artwork. Of course the current model of this is information: a dataset. That's the focus of those websites - informatics. I am not a believer in informatics in such isolation.

Of course, all this would make more sense if I got more than 2 uninterrupted minutes at a time to write. Beware of instant content.

A

I have so much to tell you & do not know where to begin

I'm trying to create video for looped playback. Something I haven't done (any video production at all) for about 15 years:

This was my blurb:

extruded snow
refers to tuning for broadcasts (sound and vision). There are worlds of richness in between the narrow bands where something supposedly intelligible is broadcast. That is well-known & well-explored fact in art & musical works created since the advent of radio receivers.

Many modern TV receivers attempt to hide what happens between bands, which is the preserve of every kind of noise - up to & including the cosmic. I'd like to create someting that does the opposite...

This particular extrusion (used in the sense of passing a starting material through a series of operations which change it into something else) is an early stage of working with this audio & visual plasma & artefacts.

tourism of a sort

I just discovered: http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/. Now I know what a 'GLIDE number' is too. It's a very comprehensive system - including a code for 'animal attacks'...

There's also: http://www.gdacs.org/

One of those slightly weird moments when you're reminded that anything (in terms of published information) is available at anytime. I rather envy the programmers who worked on all this. Web Services (tapping news & information feeds) are nice to work with.