Taylor Street Studio

Migration...

I have moved past posts over to my new blog/vlog soluble fish, which is the name of my Breton inspired video blog site started in 2001.

Why the change? Tired of fiddling with Movable Type. Constant invasions. Wordpress.com seems simple, free and protected.

Also, looking for a new start. Which will happen. Sometime soon.

Please visit.

Thanks.

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Steam, Light, Grid

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An elaborate voodle. It took most of a Sunday, but thoroughly enjoyed moving panels around the grid. The "pixelate" effect generates a rich map on which to work and then it is a matter of intuitively putting on layers and rendering to see what happens.

The audio is made up of tracks from Eno and Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which are available for free download and remixing. Imagine if all musicians offered this from their back catalog.

Also woven through the audio are Dava Sobel's "Street Five." (via Negative Sound Institute) and city textures from Freesound.

Carp Caviar '08

Carp Caviar returns.

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Animal Pile

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My last video post of this year. A quickie loop.

Videobloggers were ambitious in 2007 and the results are mixed. For me, the highlight of online video was Navlopomo. As Aaron Valdez put it so clearly:

"In this show-saturated, promote-yourself-to-death state of videoblogging it was great to see the videos from all over the world with no other intention than sharing. It’s just great to see people doing for the love of doing. I feel like it’s lost more and more every day, that idea that somehow this form will change things. There are a lot of people involved in some amazing projects, but somehow the magic is getting lost, those little moments."
-Aaron Valdez

My own inkling, and what keeps me going in online video for the next year, is the sense that we are building real value around something immaterial and ephemeral. What is permanent in this overwhelming flood of video? To me it is the distinctive voice. The tactic. The insurgent attack on the everyday.

A culture is growing around the desire to look thru another's eyes. This might be the real dream of cinema and not the vaudeville entrepeneur's hope of making a buck. We all want to make a living at doing what we love, but this is just the beginning of a new kind of discourse and new space for cognitive exploration. The practice needs nurturing before the harvesting.

And so, following the advice of a favorite and recently revived vlogger, I am giving this video post of an animal pile to a "voodler." Sam Renseiw's spacetwo : patalab, for me, is a model of this new practice:
1. take small camera everywhere
2. move through space letting the body/camera record its traces
3. post-produce the pieces into psychogeographic maps
4. repeat

All the best in the New Year.

Western Loop

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This loop comes in at 33 seconds. Moving into epic scale! My daughter looked over my shoulder as I was making some final adjustments and asked, "What are you doing?"

Good question. I'm not sure, but I am looking deeply within a relatively short span of time and that is exciting. The conscious mind can only process something like 16 bits of information at any moment. The body processes millions of bits in the same moment. Deep seeing has something to do with moving aside the conscious mind to make way for something more expansive. I'm still learning...

Inspirations are coming from three who were together in art school:
Tom Phillips
Roy Ascott
Brian Eno (the student of the above two)

Another Loop

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I can't get away from them. I will be posting one more loop to complete a loop series using movie iconography.

NaVloPoMo #30

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Congratulations to participants of National Videoblog Posting Month. Enjoyed making and watching, though I still have catching up to do on the watching. Thanks for stopping by.

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NaVloPoMo #29

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One more loop completes the cycle of this month's game. I must admit, I'm getting tired of the ten second rule. Eager to go in new directions. This one for example is limited by the ten seconds. If the panels extended the flow of information - just enough - then it might be more interesting.

I want multiple asynchronous loops going out of phase, suggesting ever wider narrative landscapes. This can be done on a webpage with several quicktime movies playing and looping independently (bandwidth is always a concern, however). A five second loop, next to a twenty second loop, next to a minute loop. In some of the loops I have created this month, I replicate this independent play by capturing a minute of this asynchronous behavior. But really a minute is plenty to suggest eternity, especially when there are so many other things to see.

A static painting or photograph is the ultimate loop, of course. Some paintings you give several seconds, others several minutes and beyond. It depends entirely on whether the inputs trigger other pictures, colors, sounds, abstractions, movies, memories, fantasies. Selection of inputs is key to making the difference between generative boredom and just plain boredom.

Cinema Gardens

Listening to the many great speakers on the Seminars About Long Term Thinking podcast. Here is Brian Eno speaking with Sims creator Will Wright about asynchronous loops:

"Instead of trying to design a piece from the top down, which is what you normally think of as composition - you know, you sort of build it piece by piece like an architect makes a building - this is more like a gardener. You have a seed, you plant it and see what happens." - Brian Eno

Cinema has its monuments. It is time to harness forces and make cinema gardens. For me anyway, this shift has been liberating. Less about the creator, more about the discovering. Ambient and serial music (esp. Cage, Eno, Reich, Glass), generative literature such as OuLiPo ( esp. Queneau and Perec) are the models. Of course, there is now a history of generative video practice which I am just discovering. Not as easy to find, because many pieces are not on the net, nor available on DVD.

NaVloPoMo #28

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NaVloPoMo #27

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Something a little different. Rhythm track from The Boredoms.

A time quilt.

NaVloPoMo #22

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I've just discovered the writings of Roy Ascott, Brian Eno's teacher at art school. Static cinema, ambient cinema, the loop.

"Is it useful to discuss the thermodynamics of an artwork? An artwork is hot when it is densely stacked with information bits, highly organized, and rigidly determined. Hot artwork admits of very little feedback in the system artifact/observer, it's really a one-way channel; pushing a message from the artist, out through the artwork into the spectator.

Call it cool when the information bits are loosely stacked, of uncertain order, not clearly connected, ambiguous, entropic. Then the system allows the observer to participate, projecting his own sense of order or significance into the work, or setting up resonances by quite unpredicted interaction with it. We must also consider the cut-out mechanism that operates when an artwork overheats; when it is too hot; too densely stacked, with an overburdened accumulation of bits, a sort of infinitely inclusive field. Then the system switches to avery cool state and feedback of a high oder is possible."

- Roy Ascott, from "Behaviourables and Futuribles" in Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness