Soluble Fish » Loop

Animal Pile

wluers — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:30:50 +0000

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.

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Western Loop

wluers — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 15:37:53 +0000

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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 click to play I can’t get away from them. I...
NaVloPoMo #22 click to play I’ve just discovered the writings of Roy...
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Another Loop

wluers — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 12:03:47 +0000

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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 #15 click to play Phantom Loop Study #4: Cheating by two...
NaVloPoMo #13 click to play Phantom Study #2: This week’s loop project...
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NaVloPoMo #30

wluers — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:45:54 +0000

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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.

NaVloPoMo #29 click to play One more loop completes the cycle of...
NaVloPoMo #11 click to play...
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NaVloPoMo #29

wluers — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:16:13 +0000

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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.

NaVloPoMo #15 click to play Phantom Loop Study #4: Cheating by two...
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Cinema Gardens

wluers — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 12:04:59 +0000

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.