there was a mention of pataphysics in one of the mu-mesons' videos we've been watching over the holidays. reminded me of Sam Renseiw's spacetwo videoblog. nice to see he's still making them: "the fine art of 'pataphysics in daily life. condensed poetic voodles. A video blog by sam renseiw"
'Pataphysics, an absurdist concept coined by the French writer Alfred Jarry, is a philosophy dedicated to studying what lies beyond the realm of metaphysics. Defined as: "The science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments"
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 :
I'm heading to New Plymouth this evening for SCANZ 2009 - Symposium being held over the weekend. so I've been reading about some of the participating artists and their projects. the intro for Brett Stalbaum gave me a few ideas for a * very simple * gps video project. below is the paragraph that triggered my thoughts - especially the phrase "letting voluminous GIS data and some algorithms we wrote tell us where to go"
steps
- in your local area, or a place where you can go to easily more than once (eg probably best to do in your own country not whilst overseas unless it's somewhere you can visit again)
- walk around the space once and collect the gps data
- then use (write first) a program - perhaps web based so you could use your mobile phone??? - that randomizes the data co-ordinates and selects a position for you to go to
I've been reading about Rothko's paintings this weekend and wanted to make a video painting similar to his works. it didn't quite work out as I expected (or like a Rothko painting). but I took videos around Auckland yesterday of different colours with the plan of using them as overlayed panels of colours. instead I ended up using a slit screen and shifting the entry points + having horizontal & vertical panels + changing between the different clips.
I don't think it turned out like the later Rothko paintings though. his paintings has large blocks of colour yet they weren't really about the colour. they were about the emotions - and the paintings showed emotions through the colours & induced emotions in the viewer. there were also glimpses of spirituality in the paintings - some had an inner light which shone through the works. also the size & scale of the paintings - often wall sized - caused the viewer to be enveloped in the emotions. the video I've made doesn't have the same emotions. it's more about the colours - the colours of Auckland city. the edges in the video work are too crisp and sharp. and there's no inner light. the motion relates more to Len Lye's use of motion in images & experimental films and sculptures. I've been reading about his work and his papers prior to making the video - in the book "Figures of Motion - Len Lye - Selected Writings". so I will have to try again - & maybe filter out or soften all the edges, or only keep the lines , like brush strokes, then build them up to panels of colour. many options to think about!
