Soluble Fish » ‘Pataphysical

Signs of Light

Will — Thu, 21 May 2009 23:27:37 +0000

Images from a walk home after a Bruce Connor screening. The twilight blue played with the electric hum of street lights. The magic hour.

Steam, Light, Grid click to play An elaborate voodle. It took most of...
Less Light I have been waiting months for my delvery of Ruiz’s...
The Walking Man (phase seven) click to play iPhone With Joel Sugerman....

Steam, Light, Grid

wluers — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:30:28 +0000

click to play

An elaborate voodle. It took most of a Sunday, but great satisfaction 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.

poli-vlogging 2008 Michael Verdi teaches John Edwards how to video blog. Imagine...

Animal Pile

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

click to play

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.

No related posts.

The Boring Everyday

wluers — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:30:37 +0000

Derik A. Badman’s great blog about comics, multipaneled storytelling and generative literaure…etc. He is here quoting Alison Bechdel on “incidental life.”

“The comic strip is the definition of quotidian: it comes out everyday, you read it on the toilet, it just weaves itself into your everyday life. It’s about little details. It’s not about grand sweeping dramas. Graphic stories are able to show incidental life without having to describe it. It would be boring in a book to read about a piece of crumpled paper on the floor. You might not want to waste time describing it. In a picture you can just show it without drawing attention to it, without pointing to it.”
-Alison Bechdel
Madinkbeard » Blog Archive » Bechdel on Everyday

No related posts.

Professor VJ

wluers — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 20:55:45 +0000

In bed with a bad back and consuming the archives of Mark Amerika aka Professor VJ. He is making cinema and modeling a spontaneous, intuitive way of working through his blog. Mysterious, body-centered, "not-me" explorations with actors, landscapes, camera and editing tools – nutritious fodder for ambitious art vloggers. And not to mention an important way to "market" a work-in-progress. Drawing in like-minded practitioners with almost tribal pulses of thought.

"As a VJ performer, net artist, metafictional novelist, and newly reconfigured HDV composer, it seems to me like we are now quite capable of moving well beyond film (as film) while at the same time inventing spontaneous, multi-layered towers of digital babble to play our (life's) work in. At this stage of the game, we can no longer oversimplify our experience by saying "My life is like a movie." To me, it feels as if I am a reality hacker, remixing levels of (un)conscious opacities / capacities, creating customized artist-apparatus filters so that I can better manipulate the data that passes through me as I process my immediate life experience which, it ends up, is always (already) foreign." -Professor VJ

No related posts.

The Woodcarver

wluers — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:29:08 +0000

Khing, the master carver, made a bell stand
Of precious wood. When it was finished,
All who saw it were astounded. They said it must be
The work of spirits.
The Prince of Lu said to the master carver:
“What is your secret?”

Khing replied: “I am only a workman:
I have no secret. There is only this:
When I began to think about the work you commanded
I guarded my spirit, did not expend it
On trifles, that were not to the point.
I fasted in order to set
My heart at rest.
After three days fasting,
I had forgotten gain and success.
After five days
I had forgotten praise or criticism.
After seven days
I had forgotten my body
With all its limbs.

“By this time all thought of your Highness
And of the court had faded away.
All that might distract me from the work
Had vanished.
I was collected in the single thought
Of the bell stand.

“Then I went to the forest
To see the trees in their own natural state.
When the right tree appeared before my eyes,
The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond doubt.
All I had to do was to put forth my hand
and begin.

“If I had not met this particular tree
There would have been
No bell stand at all.

“What happened?
My own collected thought
Encountered the hidden potential in the wood;
From this live encounter came the work
Which you ascribe to the spirits.”

- Chuang Tzu
from The Way of Chuang Tzu by Thomas Merton

No related posts.

Environment-poem

wluers — Thu, 31 May 2007 12:10:50 +0000

A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination

by Angus Fletcher

I devoured this book. It resonated with thoughts of an emergent poetics of online cinema. Angus Flectcher argues that Amercian poetry, starting with Whitman, exploded the notion that poetry should gather images to form an expression of the poet’s or reader’s concern – an allegory of human import. This is a top-down procedure. How to use nature to express (illustrate) eternal truths, etc.

Whitman and John Ashbery are used as models for a new bottom-up approach to gathering images. A poem as an attempt to shape/probe the chaos of spatial experience – objects, associations, other media, landscape, weather, memories, queries, signs – all go into the semiotic mix.

Of course, poetry has a rich history of formal contraints (sestina, sonnet, haiku – many based on numbers) that give shape to the chaos. Online cinema needs these new constraints, but what is a vlog post other than an attempt to capture the semiotic flux of experince using sound, image, text, thought etc.

Fletcher draws on the seven-fold paradigm of Complexity Theory (via John H. Holland) as good principles of making poetry or any art that values ecosystems over heroic stories. Here I will take the liberty of (off the cuff) translating these principles for online cinema:

1. aggregation: gathering the materials, the images, sounds and texts. the subject.
2. tagging: signals an order of importance, for literature this is rhetorics. For video this is simply editing and mixing – camera angle, distance, scale, duration – as well as the rhetorics for text and spoken word.
3. nonlinearity: getting the parts to interact. internal references. how can the editing generate questions about what has come before and what will come next?
4. flow: the development of theme, plot. how time is handled. the experience of time. where are we going?
5. diversity: images that are, well, diverse. a vlog about a garden would include the fowers, but also the stray gum wrapper.
6. model or schema: pruning. shaping the piece. the intention can be hidden or quite simple and direct.
7. building blocks: for poetry this would be the words. reworking a line, trying to find the best word, etc. for video, spoken words or text are included in the visual and auditory building blocks of frames/shots/sounds/music.

“If we identify coherence with a loose and notably inconsistent completeness, we reach the artistic representing of environments, a representing pressed so far that the poem actually is an environment. This view would assert that there are two external real worlds, the one we daily walk around in (or drive cars through), and the one the environment-poet has invented. Both would have equal shares of the real – equal shares of Being.” (pg 227)
- Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry

Vlog Theory & Practice Returning from a very long hiatus. I’ve been teaching, parenting...

Bee Curious

wluers — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:41:09 +0000

Click To Play

QT version

Found while driving. My eyes focused on the road, the camera lets me see what would have been missed. Vlogging = safety.

Less Light I have been waiting months for my delvery of Ruiz’s...