I’ve decided that I want to create a real website for you all under my own domain, with a blog, tutorials and resources all surrounding underground and experimental animation and cinema.

So In the mean time I’m putting this blog into a hiatus for the next few months while I raise the money and know-how  to create a better and more interesting place for people to look, discuss and learn.

A big thankyou to all the people who have been interested in my work and what I do.

I’ll have the new website up within the next 6 months and i’ll post it up here when it’s ready. I’ll see you all then.

Good luck with all your creative endeavours.

-Permian

It’s packed full of interview of people working around live video performance and light. Some of which really resonate with how i’m feeling about the whole scene, and some i completely disagree with.

I was at the train station yesterday and I read the interview with Henry Warwick and it really hit with how i am feeling at the moment about the art-form.

So here’re a few sections of the interview.

———————————————————

Paul Spinard: You’ve emphasized the importance of narrative in all forms of performance, because storytelling…

Henry Warwick: That’s the essence!

PS: Yes, that’s how the brain works.

HW: The reason I came up with Performance Cinema is that the term “VJ” is tied into the DJ aesthetic of pastiche – gluing things together that are not normally related. The DJ’s purpose is to keep a party going, and you don’t need a narrative to have a really good dance party.

Most VJs reinforce this lack of flow in terms of ideas. They just throw stuff together, and there doesn’t have to be any brain behind it. Like, they’ll take swishy-looking images, then mic in some home movies of somebody’s pets, combine it with George W. Bush, throw in some traffic images and clips from Koyannisqatsi, and that’s it – They’re done. It’s easy to do, and it might look cool for about ten minutes, but it’s not telling me anything. I mean, it’s kind of “political” because of the Koyannisqatsi and Bush images, but it’s not a studied idea, you’re not really getting the point across. There’s no narrative.

There doesn’t always have to be a specific point, but there might be some kind of resonant logic behind what you’re looking at. Otherwise it’s like, well, I’ve seen this a thousand times.

______________________________________________________

PS: But in a place where dancing is the main focus, won’t the music always be more important?

HW: Bingo. That’s why VJ is doomed, so long as it’s carried by the dance scene. To evolve, the form needs to break away and expand into other forms of performance cinema.

It’s not going to be easy. First of all, there’s the whole economic issue. The club VJ currently has industrial backing from DJ equipment manufacturers, but performance cinema does not. Another thing is, you have to get people into a space where they’re willing to pay attention to something long enough to get involved with it. It’s hard to do, especially for a form that’s unfamiliar to most people. There’s an important political issue here as well: the right to assembly. This right has no meaning when people don’t get together, when everybody is atomized into their suburban bunkers.

Another issue is more technical: performers need the ability to control the audio. They don’t currently have this because most of the live video mixing tools are designed for the DJ/VJ scenario., which divorces the VJ form the sound. None of the major VJ software applications I know of give you significant control over audio production. Sometimes they take audio in, but only for triggering or eye candy “visualizations” that are dictated by the music. From the other end, almost all software for mixing audio clips can’t handle video very well, if at all – certainly not in the sense that a VJ, or live cinema artists requires.

Tool-providers are giving the tool users what they want, and right now a number of users just want to make goofy shit that flies around on the screen at a party. So we’re limited until performance cinema can rear it’s ugly head and tell developers that we’d like to control both video and audio in a comprehensive, coordinated and synchronized way. I’ve been in touch with many of the major developers who are in the middle of this. They are all doing amazing work, but it seems to me that they spend a lot of time optimizing their software for live video processing, not live audio/video arrangement and direction.

————————————————————–

I’ve been feeling pretty disillusioned with the whole VJ beat in the last few weeks. So i’m not sure how far i’m going to go with it. I’ll definitely be experimenting with live cinema work in the future, but will i be playing at clubs and parties? Probably not.

It’s not even that i don’t find it enjoyable. Playing and mixing video to people partying and having a good time IS fun. But it’s all about what I want to accomplish in the limited time I have. I can’t help but feel that when i’m fucking around and mashing up bits of video, that i could be learning and working on something more meaningful to me and my future projects.

And so ends my rant for the week.

all the best to you pixel pushers out there

_permian

Here’s an interesting summary of Neil Postman’s ‘Technopoly’.

Interesting ideas for people interested in technology influenced arts.

I stumbled across these videos through another project CDM(a great site for VJs updated frequently) had on Eclectic Method from the UK.

These tutorials from Eclectic Method are really great for learning how to remix video that is linked to the overall beat or music, something that i haven’t really experimented with so far but now wish to.

_perm.

Kevin Smith talks about how he’s going to get his new movie out there. M Dot has been talking about self distrib for ages, and this is an extension of that . If you’re interested in eventually creating your own features and not being a studio fuckpuppet, watch this it is very inspirational.

Here’s some interesting work from Robert Seidel for those  interested in abstraction.

“_grau is a personal reflection on memories coming up during a car accident, where past events emerge, fuse, erode and finally vanish ethereally … various real sources where distorted, filtered and fitted into a sculptural structure to create not a plain abstract, but a very private snapshot of a whole life within its last seconds …”

http://vimeo.com/robertseidel

Here it is. I’m pretty happy with the output. The loops within it aren’t perfect as i should have done more calculations as to the timing of each stop-mo clip withing the composition.

As i said as the vimeo comment, I think this will be the last time i’ll use dirt as a stop-motion material, at least for a while. I love the look of it but it is hell to work with and control. Still don’t let me discourage any of you out there brave enough to experiment with it… dirt is awesome XD

I haven’t had time to go into Horse Bazaar and put it up yet, so i’ll go in next monday for a jam after my first uni night class of the year ‘electronics for artists’… I’m so pumped to bend some circuits!

Seeing as my video camera got stolen last year i’ll have to borrow a phone to take the video of the projection… so the quality won’t be great but at least it will be a record of where it went.

I’ve also been thinking lately of upgrading to Vimeo Plus because it’s only $60 a year and the benefits look schweeeet. So depending on my bank account tonight, i’ll upload some older stuff to juicy vimeo quality.

I hope you guys liked the piece. Pretty soon I’ll start to throw up and document the creating of a new narrative animation i’ve been thinking about, so you can see my process in full.

-Perm

If you are into animation of any form read this book!

The book features studies on works by animators such as:

Joost Rekveld

Steve Reinke

Don Hertzfeldt

Mika Tyyska

Brian Evans

PES

Anouk de Clerq

Pierre Herbert

Joanna Priestley

Eric Dyer

Peter Tscherkassky and plenty of others.

Here are a few brilliant shorts from the festival.

This one isn’t in the fests but check it out anyway. It’s really interesting.

-PErm