"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.
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 :
bookmarking Expanded Cinema - by Gene Youngblood - I have a printed copy of this book, but this online version will be useful for quick & remote access. there's an introduction by R. Buckminster Fuller too!
I think I bought the wrong book though - we were meant to read Sheldrake's "Seven Experiments That Could Change the World", but I bought a copy of "Sense of Being Stared At" & then found this on scribd.com as well.
the I heart Kings Cross project has been installed into Fitzroy Gardens & surrounding streets in Kings Cross, Sydney. it looks amazing! it took a week to install & they used a tall ladder and a crane.
the knits seem to blend in to their surroundings well & at the same time brighten up the streets. I took waaay too many photos but I couldn't stop look at the detail and volume of amazing work. incredible! I couldn't stop staring at the detail of the stitches. I had to wait for my sister to arrive so I had some time after the launch to listen & watch some of the people's responses - everyone seemed to love it! they were taking turns having photos on Jade's knitted chair, and in front of the trees' branches and next to Zoe's circle piece on the sculpture & the I heart Kings Cross logo as well as staring up at the tall tree pieces.
thanks to Reef Knot - especially Michelle McCosker, for organizing everything and letting me contribute. was a lot of fun. I hope they keep me informed of any future projects!
notes taken at the Archiving Australia's Experimental Music session by Carla Teixeira from the National Film & Sound Archive on Thursday 01/09/2009 at This is Not Art 2009 festival. (+ links & info found whilst writing these notes up)
- archives are stored in Canberra, but there are NFSA offices in Sydney and Melbourne
- experimental music & sound art is only a very small part of the NFSA's collection, though they would like to increase its proportion and help preserve Australia's history in these fields
- not all of an artist's work is archived; the artist curates their own collection and selects representative works to be archived
Call Me Your Experiment was a workshop held in Newcastle's Civic Park on Friday 02/10/2009 as part of the This Is Not Art 2009 festival
Alison Currie explained her project, but I missed the start of the workshop so I might have misunderstood the whole aim. What I gathered was that we had to learn and perform a dance when our mobile phones rang. Her idea was that mobile phones often interrupt us and the ring tone could be used as a song to dance to, and slow us down from being a slave to the mobile and answering too quickly. It was a type of mobile phone flash mob. We were given the song 9-question_it.mp3 via bluetooth - her friend had written it. A few of us played the song on our phones at the same time - or slightly different times, so there were some nice phasing sounds.
The music sped up in the middle of the dance so we had to do the steps quicker towards the end. Alison said she was surprised - happily - that everyone picked up the steps within the short amount of time during the workshop.
I thought it was fun - it was good to do some stretching & exercise in the park in the sun too. but I think my battery would have been flat or the caller had hung up the call by the time I'd finished the dance if I had received a call. :)
here's a quick video of Alison teaching the steps & demonstrating the dance :
Alison Currie is an independent dance artist interested in creating work for alternate spaces, and unsuspecting audiences. Her major project 42a will tour nationally in 2010. Adelaide's Experimental Art Foundation page has some details of Alison Currie's 42a's 2008 performance.
There are many factors that influence Isadora's video processing
speed, including the speed and type of your processor, amount of RAM
installed on your computer, hard disk speed, the format in which the
video files are stored, and several other factors. This section
details several tips to help you get the very fastest frame rates from
Isadora.
Tip 1: Use the fastest computer you can
Much of the code inside Isadora is optimized for these the SSE /
Altivec processors that are part of most contemporaray Intel or
PowerPC chips. Using these processors will result in significant speed
increases when compared to G3 or non-MMX processors.
