With:
Pimmon & Jeff Burch (Solo Sets & Debut Live Collaboration as Mandala Trap), Comatone, Kyu, Anon, Scissor Lock, Anna Chase, Nick Wishart with DJ Sets from Kevin Purdy (Tooth), Tim Ritchie (Sound Quality, ABC Radio National) and Tom Smith (Cleptoclectics).
after a while listening to Jeff Burch's set, I became transfixed on the shadows on the screen - it seemed as if there were multiple versions of him playing. the digital noise video background projected onto the 'real' Burch, so at times he seemed like a projection also - which was the real person playing?? :)
Jeff Burch #7 : Unpopular Music @ Red Rattler
07/11/2009
finished reading "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by HP Lovecraft for class yesterday. so I went for coffee & eggs to think more upon spheres and came across a few circles & turns in my saturday travels.
these are older clips of Istanbul - walking the streets of Balat - the older parts of the city. filmed in april 2008. I don't think these have been uploaded before. I loved hearing the sounds of the call to prayer as we walked through the alley ways. I have some other audio recordings of this but I need to find them (really need to sort things better here..)
this is made in isadora. I increased the size of the stage and the video saves to disk better now! quality wise that is. maybe I should go back and resave all my old videos. because I'm playing out multiple files to a single projector, they're not playing smoothly, but I was expecting this - it's a performance issue. but I'm happier with the video quality/resolution using a 640x480 stage. (previously I'd always used the default 320x240)
I had to rotate some of the clips 90 degrees as I'd turned the camera whilst filming - this is the main reason I hadn't uploaded/used them before. hadn't got round to rotating them! slack hey :)
running late tonight so I modified a processing patch used for a different project - playing with tints and darker images. maybe it's the influence of the HP Lovecraft class I'm doing a the moment.. ;)
my office spent Melbourne Cup at Rosehill Raceway. I didn't win any money - my horses peaked too early. Olivia Newton John sang the national anthem and everyone stood up - well almost everyone. we watched a couple of races at the track too
this was filmed using my Nokia N95 camera - the video quality isn't very good when zoomed in
Alan LAMB & Dave NOYZE's performance of rain on the wires. it sounded like space invaders / star wars laser guns!
Wired Lab Open Day
31/10/2009
Cootamundra, NSW
Garry Bradbury & Alan LAMB's performance - live mixing in the pitch of "B" (also the pitch of Bees in chorus) - Bradbury selected some of the raw wires sounds and compiled them together into a georgeous layered ambient piece, and Lamb played the wire with a large bow - such an amazing physical performance with simply beautiful sounds. this was the highlight performance of the night for me. masterful!!
Wired Lab Open Day
31/10/2009
Cootamundra, NSW
I finished reading Rohinton Mistry's "Tales from Firozsha Baag" last week - it's another great book from him. "A Fine Balance" is my favourite book of his - it reminds me so much of my impressions of India and Delhi, though he tends to write more about Mumbai.
Warren Burt sent an email to the ACMA list today mentioning "I've now put up six videos of some of my work from the past 18 months. If you have time, check them out. I'd be interested in hearing what people think."
here are the links and descriptions from his email. this is amazing! it's so great that sound artists are sharing their work with others and documenting their work & performances.
:::
Hilbert Trace - an abstract video and sound
piece which traces the Hilbert fractal and uses
old-fashioned 8bit sound in the soundtrack. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpVC-NL2Vao
:::
Board Instruments
Improvisation with homemade electro-acoustic
percussion board instruments which are processed
by a computer program to make an accompaniment
for me to play with. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iCq5Wq8NA
"Fairy Tales - retold by Bridget Hadaway" book - these are from my favourite Fairy Tales book when I was a child. I went back to Brisbane last weekend and stayed at Mum's place and was talking about Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales books and had Mum kept our books and then I found this one. my favourite stories were Princess and the Pea, Ali Baba & the 40 Thieves, and The Little Mermaid. I LOVED the illustrations and I remembered them better than the stories I think. the other stories and illustrations in the book are great too, but these three are the ones I remember most - especially The Little Mermaid - I used to read that one over and over.
Fairy Tales - retold by Bridget Hadaway
ISBN 0 7064 0374 6 - First published by Octopus Books Ltd, 59 Grosvenor Street, London W1 in 1974
I went to check out the apartments in Waterloo today. not sure if I can afford one though. they're very close to Crown St (behind Bourke St) so there's lots of cafes and restaurants nearby. it was a 15-20min walk from Green Square station though - I think the buses are closer. I'd caught the train into the city but the Airport line was closed and CityRail had buses replacing the trains. but the bus didn't stop at Green Square so I ended up at Mascot and had to come back. there was a Mazda dealership across the road so I dropped in to see the Mazda2 as I think I'm going to have to buy a car and they're very cute. not even one person tried to help me. :( so I left and walked up to Danks St - using the Maps on my phone to find the directions. there's a new French cafe on the corner. I ate at the Whole Foods cafe, looking out at the street from the benches next to the open sliding windows. such a lovely day. some people were talking at the table in front of me and they'd mentioned to a friend who dropped by and stopped to talk to them, that the French cafe was new and booked up & it was hard to find a table.
I popped into Morris & Sons prior to catching the train and bought some more yarn and a cute Panda toys pattern book - these look fairly simple and quick to make and the samples in the store were quite cute. each toy can be made from 1 skein of 8mm yarn. they didn't have the Panda yarns at the store, so I bought some Cleckheaton "Country" and Elie Riva "Natal" 8mms instead as it's quite nice to knit up. Panda is an Australian yarn company too - I hadn't heard of them before, but I noticed there were a few pattern booklets in the store. I think I'll sew the eyes though instead of using sew on ones, so the babies don't accidently swallow them. I might try make one for Kim's new baby, and if I manage them, maybe some for Tab's and Bec's kids. they're only little hand-sized toys. the lady in the store said to knit with two strands - one from the end & one from the centre of the skein to make them larger like the samples in the store. we'll see how I manage.. also I bought some Debbie Bliss "cashmerino aran" to make a small baby blanket - it's the "throw" from the Debbie Bliss "the baby knits book" - I cheated and wrote out the pattern in my notebook whilst in the store as I didn't want the rest of the patterns in the book and the book was quite expensive.
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 ;)
this is one of the nativity scenes in a store window in granville, sydney. it reminds me of bethlehem! the stores there have similar window displays & market stalls. very tacky! I wonder who buys these things? this store fascinates me though - I want to video the whole window display as it's full of garden decorations and really tacky outdoor ornaments packed side by side. there never seems to be anyone there but I generally see it whilst walking home from the train so it's not really peak shopping hours. this side of the granville train station is pretty desolate - I think they need a "Renew Granville" project similar to Marcus Westbury's Renew Newcastle project.
