Tuesday, August 28, 2007

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.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

mattstetten




which trail would you choose?

Thursday, August 16, 2007

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).

Sunday, August 5, 2007

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.

Thursday, August 2, 2007

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.