before i forget

Just a close up of the face blotting process. (oh so complicated duuurrrr)

an update from way back

I managed to snag the 'work-in-progress' photos of my wall/painty collage work, I've basically collected some old newspapers (I also snagged some from a fellow student, thanks Zara), smeared some white paint on keywords and the faces of people (kinda' a nod towards the whole name/scribbling work and face/censor videos I've worked on).

whoathere

Holy crap, I couldn't update shit for the past few days because for some retarded reason I've forgotten my password to this place; then I freaked out a bit.

Anyway, I managed to score all the necessary AV equipment for my final crit (before the final exam), which didn't turn out too bad.

Gotta' play around some more, especially with the newspaper wall collage work and deciding on which video will I be using exactly for the final examination.

Blergh. So much work.

the hands resist him:update

Remember those paintings that were broken down to simple palettes?

Welp, I'm doing that with the haunted painting.





And turning it into a video. I'll most probably display this right next to the digital copy of The Hands Resist Him.

the hands resist him:ref 07

The infamous 'haunted' painting that was sold on eBay for $1025.



If I display this painting through a CRT monitor, will its 'affect' my studio space? Will changing its format change the feel and meaning of the painting?

malcolm x/martin luther king:ref 06

After playing around with that burning monk video, I've been looking for more important historical videos (particularly those in b&w simply for aesthetic value). I came across two speeches, one by Malcolm X and the other by Martin Luther King (got screenshots of the latter).




Both racially charged speeches, so that's a connection there.

I'll play around and see what I come up with.

steamboat willie:ref 05

After watching Suicide Mouse, I've been inspired to work on a parody of some sort. By taking a copy of Steamboat Willie,





I'll distort and destroy it so that it's almost an echo of the infamous Suicide Mouse video. Breaking it down and apart and changing the original Steamboat Willie's context and meaning.

Or something like that.

Thích Quảng Đức/roger hilsman speech:ref 04

Video mentioned in this entry is something that I sampled for one of my video experiments, which features the famous self-immolation of Buddhist monk protestant Thích Quảng Đức, and with Roger Hilsman's speech in conjunction with clips of the burning monk.

been a while:update + artist ref:john stezaker

Whoa, another full week+ since I updated this space. I've been incredibly busy trying to produce new experiments and coming up with new ideas, but I kept running into dead ends and artist blocks.

Well, for one, I've been 'building' a wall of collages that are made up of newspaper clippings with faces and keywords blotched out (this is connected to that paperback name-crossing-out-whatever work that's located right next to it in my studio corner space).



And another thing; my tutor had provided me with some info on an interesting artist by the name of John Stezaker. Google images had a ton of his artworks, and one of the only good articles I've found of him is this Saatchi Gallery article.

digital paint experiment

Finally found a way to find the colour code that makes up a pixel.



Awesome.

suicide mouse:ref 02

Another popular viral video that's been floating around and being generally big in the creepypasta-esque crowd on the internet. Suicide Mouse is a supposed 'secret' video that Walt Disney stored away because of its 'disturbing' nature.

Everything about it screams fake, of course. But the audio used in the video could very well be something I'll be using in one of my video experiments...





You can catch the video right here.

Have fun.

candle cove:ref 01

As a reference and source for my video experiment, here's an /x/ wiki of Candle Cove. What is it? Long story made short, it's a popular creepypasta, but just click on the link and find out.

Somebody from SomethingAwful (?) even created the infamous s01ep12 of Candle Cove (which is viewable in the aforementioned wiki link).

whatthehey

The longer I work on this 'mosaic censor' Big Bang Theory video, the more I realized how cluttered and clunky the video is becoming because of the amount of titles I've created for every time the characters' faces move. Almost like a 'censor their faces frame-by-frame' approach.



I MEAN LOOK AT THAT. And that's barely a minute into the episode.

There must be a way to create censors for moving objects that doesn't require this much work...

along the way...

Whoa, it's been almost a week since my last entry to this little blog of... documentation and research and whathaveyou for 201. Yikes (this won't look pretty for the 'Research' and documentation criteria of my final marks).

But I've just popped in here to notify those who it may concern (lol) that I'm still playing around with more videos and experimenting with ways to distort videos visually and its audio.

Recently I've censored the faces of characters from 'The Luminous Fish Effect' episode of Big Bang Theory, as well as distorting the voices of the characters. Next I'll see if I can 'censor' the background (or basically everything else other than the characters). Change the pitch of the audio, w/e.

Just basically play around more. Make more work.



Here's a screenshot of that Big Bang Theory episode I've mucked around with.

And regarding the Renaissance painting experiment, here's a sneak peek.

ideas06

Before I forget: add canned laughter (exaggerated?) to shows/films that are serious (or something along those lines) in nature, Microsoft Sam/Sally-fy the dialogue of an episode of a show, attempt to remove voices of the characters of sitcoms (end up with only the background noise and canned laughter).

mini crit

Had a mini 1-on-1 with my tutor yesterday. Turns out that I should really up my game here and, word-for-word "exaggerate things a bit".

Hmmm. Not sure how I can do that, I'm currently drawing a real blank here.

Ah well. I'll just make more video snippets, play around a bit more and maybe find myself a 'Eureka!' moment or two.

wtf laughtrack

Good lord, why hasn't anyone told me how bloody hard it is to rip laughtracks/canned laughter from sitcoms?!

Holy crap, this is gonna' take a while. Ripping bits of giggles and chortles isn't exactly all fun and games, jeebus.

Oh well, this counts as a process, mmm'yes?

ideas05

While I'm waiting for "The Gang Gets Invincible" (from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia) and "The Luminous Fish Effect" (from Big Bang Theory) to finish popping itself into my hard-drive, I'll just note some ideas before I forget about them.

A'ight, for "The Gang Gets Invincible", I'll just insert some canned laughter into parts that are, well, funny. imo anyway. And as for "The Luminous Fish Effect", it's something much more complex, I'll censor the characters' faces (mosaic?) and distort all of their speech.

That way it completely changes the way the audience interprets the show. Changing the media and its context, perhaps?

red dwarf: backwards

Along with that Seinfeld episode, I'm done with making Red Dwarf's episode play backwards in its entirety.

I originally intended to only extract the backwards snippets and reverse them, but I dunno', I thought it'll be more interesting for the audience to watch the entire episode and try and catch parts that were reversed and thus ended up playing normally.

seinfeld: the betrayal

I'm officially done with putting Seinfeld's episode "The Betrayal" in its 'correct' order. It was my first time playing with Adobe Premiere. I had some trouble getting used to some of the tools and all, but hey, I finally got it done.

I'll definitely play around with more effects from the software and see what I can get. (I'm currently trying to get my hands on episodes of How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory, maybe It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia)

update

Whoa, haven't updated this spot for a couple of days, but no worries. It's because I've been running around trying to find a way to get into my phone and upload some photos (without needing to spend any money on a new card reader or something stupid like that).

Anyway, I've just updated the entire blog with photos everywhere.



Oh yeah, and I decided to hunt down some pictures of Renaissance paintings and I'm thinkin' of finding a way of 'breaking them down'. I'll be updating this blog with more details about that soon.

ps

Oh, and the really old looking recorded sequences of Pure Beauty reminded me a lot of Boards of Canada's fan videos.

The fanvideo for "Everything You Do Is Balloons" in particular.



Not too sure how relevant this is to the project. But meh, just thought I'd throw that out there.

john baldessari: pure beauty

Saw John Baldessari: Pure Beauty from the Tate Channel during the second half of studio yesterday. It was an interesting insight into his perception on (well, maybe on too broad a scale) art and a peek at his artistic practice.

A part that really got me was the whole idea of 'cremating' one's artwork. It's because I've had something like that happen to me before, 'cept unlike Baldessari, it was completely unintentional. tl;dr, my external hard-drive fried.

got myself a jerry and a red dwarf

Finally got my hands on the "Backwards" episode of Red Dwarf and Seinfeld's "The Betrayal" episode. I'll get to work on them right now, first phase of this video experiment would be for me to put "The Betrayal" in the 'correct' chronological order.

More info about this later. Next post.

ugh

Couldn't go out to forage for more acorns yesterday; shitty weather was shitty. Rain everywhere.

I'll post pics later. Trust me, it was bad.

ideas04

Oh, here's maybe another approach to the "Put Out More Flags" experiment, I could paste all pages I've done up on my studio wall. Sorta' like how museums display old manuscripts and such. Perhaps the pages could double up as a crappy wallpaper of sorts too?

edit: Maybe I could also sort the pages out by putting the even-numbered ones together and the odd-numbered ones somewhere else?

ideas03

While wondering around the studio today, I picked up "Put Out More Flags" by Evelyn Waugh. It was a book that our tutor Louise gave Sarah for an activity during our first day as a studio together. Welp, since Sarah said I could keep and and muck around with, might as well.

As a starting point, I guess I could go through the entire book and cross out all of the characters' names. Dunno' why, that's the first thing that popped into my head when I thought about how I could change the book physically (not to the extreme) while putting it somewhat out of its original context. With the characters' names crossed out, it leaves the reader wondering who's doing what and saying and generally, what the bloody hell is going on.

And regarding documentation, I'll fold the page that I'll stop at for the day. That should be something.

artist model: paul pfeiffer

Found a great artist model for my video editing experiments. Guy goes by the name of Paul Pfeiffer. Notable works that I find interesting include "The Long Count (Rumble in the Jungle)" and "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse".

What really caught my eye is how relevant a number of his work is to this project. Pfeiffer had not only physically transformed the video and photos, but he had also changed the original context of these items (by removing the figures of Muhammad Ali and Marylin Monroe).

I won't go into details as to how he did it (don't like re-iterating the punchline of a joke that I might've possibly misinterpreted, see), but here's a great link which gives a good introductory insight to Paul Pfeiffer's artistic practice and body of works. And you could perhaps work things out yourself.

ideas02

I suddenly remember this piece of video work by an artist whose name I've completely forgotten and may experiment on a little something based on it. The video loops a string of paint being poured onto a black background, basically the pouring lasts for as long as the video is playing (it's a neverending loop), sometimes the paint changes colour and changes the overall appearance of the paint 'goop', but the shape and size of the paint 'goop' remains pretty much the same during the entire video. Only thing changing are the changing colours.

(if anybody knows the name of the artist/work, be sure to let me know btw)

So anyway, I was thinking of doing something similar. Pour some paint on the lino floor in the studio. Let it dry, and then pour some more, so that it grows thicker. The idea is that I will pour a new layer every day.

edit: nope, turns out that it's a shitty idea, somebody from the other end of the the same floor is is doing/had done something extremely similar.

ideas01

So basically there's a couple of things I got in mind; physically editing existing video clips so that its original context can taken out (but that's depending on the viewer, really), for e.g. I'm thinking of removing the canned laughter/laugh track from sitcoms/censor the faces (maybe even the entire body) of the characters and distort their voices so that it's up to the audience to decide what the hell's going on, etc etc.

I'm also currently foraging and gathering some acorns from outside of the Elam building and 'storing' it in a corner of my studio space (shouldn't have watched that doco on Planet Earth...). Not too sure where this one's going, but it'll be (probably) interesting to see what'll happen to that pile of acorns within the next 6 weeks or so.

Took a couple of photos of said foraging using my phone, but unfortunately, I don't have a cord or card reader to access my phone. I'll edit this post as soon as I can get my hands on them though.

Watch this space.

edit: here they are.

a little test

Just a quick post to see how this'll look. From here on out I will be jotting down all all of research, documentation and thoughts regarding this 201 project into this blog rather than a workbook (because quite frankly, I'm tired of all this printing, cutting, pasting and generally making a mess of myself).

I'll be sure to update this blog incredibly soon. Keep your eyes peeled.