Research for project 2

Yekpare, By: Urban-Projection Group

The work that I am initially first interested in for inspiration for my video projection project is the Yekpare Istanbul Projection Project. This project is a series of spectacular video projections on an old historic Istanbul building of different morphing colors and shapes that change very slowly. According to lou-tfreshtoast.com the projections tell a story of the cities history of over 8,500 years for about fifteen minutes on the building. On urban-projection.com, the artists website, they state ”Yekpare” is a storyteller which narrates the 8500 year story of Istanbul. The story embraces symbols from Pagans to Roman Empire, from Byzantine Empire to Latin Empire, and finally from Ottoman Empire to Istanbul at the present day.” The building that the projections were displayed on is the Haydarpasa Train Station, which I found out is one of the busiest train stations in Turkey (Wikipedia.org.) This seems to be one of the main reasons as to why the group of urban artists projected the images specifically onto this building. The artists, the Urban Projection group continue explaining on their website that the images were projected and created using 3D-mapping/Video techniques, which I found to be really interesting, but also difficult. I’m really interested in creating a project using 3D mapping but I don’t think that I’ll be able to learn that much over the course of a month. The group that I’m in although has decided to do projections of real paint flowing out of the plant holders that sit above the pillars on the campus center patio. We also decided to have two figures throwing paint back and forth at each other into the center pillar. Although the Yekpare project doesn’t have paint in it, the colors that change and morph together resemble paint in my opinion. At about 2:08min the colors really start to change and you can see just how the colors start to flow together. This is the one thing that inspired me for using the idea of paint to flow somewhere at the campus center. Also, around 2:48min, the rainbow colors continue to show this idea. One thing that I find interesting about this artwork is the music that follows along with it. I could not find out what the music was or who it was by but the sounds resembled old didgeridoo sounds along with very ambient, calm sounds of a woman vocalizing sound. Another thing that I found out about this group is that they did a project with the Graffiti-Research Lab to create the Light Rider, which is a mobile projection unit. At http://www.graffitiresearchlab.de/light-rider/ there are complete drawings of the unit with a video that shows the mobile projector moving down the street. It allows for anyone to create graffiti onto any building, but instead of using a computer from one place they have a laptop that sits atop of a crate on a bike. This allows for the work to be very interactive with a lot of the public. This is another aspect of my groups final work that I would like to see utilized somehow, though I think that displaying the images in the campus center is very public to begin with. Regardless, I found this artist group to be very inspiring and I really hope we can create something just as unique.

‘YEKPARE’ (monolithic) from nerdworking on Vimeo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%B0stanbul_Haydarpa%C5%9Fa_Terminal -Train station information.

http://www.thecoolist.com/yekpare-istanbul-urban-screening-project/
-article on project by “Thecoolist.com”

http://www.urban-projection.com/?p=363
-urban projections website information on project.










Artificial Dummies, By: Todo

While searching for artists that create video projections, specifically onto buildings, I stumbled upon the artist Todo who created the piece Artificial Dummies, a video projection artwork with images of flowers, artificial creatures and other organisms that interact with the building they’re displayed on. According to thecoolist.com, the images are actually run by algorithims that control the organisms to move and bounce around the building. By doing this, the images don’t go over windows or archways, but instead bounce in between and on the outside of the window frames and edges of the archways. They also create motions that resemble swimming and chasing after eachother, and as the artists state “as if they were aware of the design and appearance of the building” They continue to state that “Flocks of weird-looking animals come to life, gather together and fly around the projection space, exploring the new territory they're living in, avoiding obstacles and enemies. As if they had just migrated to a new habitat, our creatures would explore and try to adapt to the new environment” (todo.to.it/#projects/ad.) I find this really inspirational for my groups project because of the interaction that is constructed with the projections. Not only do the projections never display the same movements and patterns but they allow viewers to follow along with the moving organisms. Also, I really like how the moving images interact with the building, which is something that we want to convey within our final piece, by having the human figures throw paint back and forth between the pillars. Although I have no idea how to use algorithims along with our moving images, I think that we could find a way to make it interactable with not only the crowd but the building. This interaction is also displayed in another project called Multi-touch R&D: Custom LLP multi-touch systems. This project allows users to use their hands to draw on a projected image to create new images and interact with the existing images. The users can draw anything they want as well as interact with objects such as water and paint. The artists explain just how it’s done by stating “LLP stands for “laser light plane”: IR emitters generate one such plain aligned to the touch surface, and then an IR camera shoots the image of fingers moving around; the image is sent to CCV (an open-source computer vision platform developed by the NUI Group community) which detects the light “blobs” and extracts their X and Y values, which are then interpreted by our own Flash/ActionScript framework so they can be used by the final application” (todo.to.it/#projects/ad.)I found this very inspiring as well because of the easy flow that was represented with the objects being controlled by the users. I really want our final piece to have a very fluid motion and I really think that by using different video editing programs we can achieve that, but I really love the way that Multi-Touch flows along with the user interacting with it.

ARTIFICIAL.DUMMIES from todo.to.it on Vimeo.

http://www.todo.to.it/ -todo it website with information on specific projects.


http://www.todo.to.it/#projects/todo_multitouch -information on Muli-touch R&D from artist website.





http://www.todo.to.it/#projects/ad -information on Artificial Dummies from artist website.

Research Artists- Pogo & Dainumo

Nick Bertke/Pogo


(http://www.bandcampsbest.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Pogo.jpg)

While searching for an artist inspiration for my new digital media project, I came across a music media artist named Nick Bertke, otherwise known as “Pogo.” His artwork is something that involves recorded sound clips from various Disney films as well as other movies, and piecing them back together so the sounds create an entirely new song. Known as an electronic musician, according to the FM music.com website “his music is often labeled as house or trip hop” (lastfm.com.) Surprisingly, there are actually videos to a lot of the music that he has produced, all using the movie clips used to produce each song. From watching a video on his website, pogomix.net, one can see just how he pieces together each set of information. Using the music program Fruity Loops Studio, Pogo is able to take clips from various characters dialogues, record them, and then sequence them together so in the end, he has a whole new song. The first video that I viewed was called “Alice,” and it used video and music clips from the movie to produce the final piece that is on YouTube today. The title Alice is from the movie that each sound clip was cut from, Alice in Wonderland (1951.) When viewing the video, it’s honestly difficult to tell that the song is made up of smaller sound clips from dialogue characters have said throughout the movie; it really sounds like a pure song. By pure, I mean that the entire final piece flows together so well that you can barely point out any imperfections within the song or video.



One piece of information that I was having trouble with at first was if Bertke actually makes the video’s first, or if he creates the music first in Fruity Loops Studio, then mashes it up with the video clips. Being that this is my first step into video art, the process for making the actual video seems really difficult. Surprisingly though, with videos such as “Alice,” the viewer can see how Bertke has tried to make the characters seem as if they were dancing and actually singing to the newly formed song. The reaction of the actual characters within the song “Alice” begin to hop around and dance as the character Alice starts to sing to the flow of sound clips. If one listens closely enough, they can hear the actual new lyrics made from the splicing of chords and sound clips. For example, the verse part of “Alice” states “There is a long way to love but I’m having trouble” (Wikipedia.org) The same is similar for his other videos, such as Wishery (Disney Remix.) In this particular video Bertke used sound clips from the movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to make a new song. The video shows Snow White singing to the new lyrics and even has the dwarfs incorporated by singing a part from their “dig, dig, dig” scene.



The idea behind Bertke’s work is really inspirational to me because he’s composing completely new works of art out of something that’s essentially in a different medium. Although he is working with both film and video, Bertke is working with two types of video; he’s creating music videos instead of making a simple video with music layed over top of it. The fact that he works with two different mediums is interesting to, in the fact that he makes new music and new videos. For me his work isn’t only video art but music art as well, which requires a lot of talent to do both. The concepts that Bertke seems to be dealing with in his work involve taking different mediums and morphing them into a new medium. By taking clips of videos and putting them to songs that he’s made, he’s changing the initial idea and meaning behind the film, and morphing it into a more whimsical and fun video that’s also a song. He not only works with Disney films but also works with movie clips from classic films such as Mary Poppins, as well as YouTube clips of natives speaking, and even my favorite remix; a piece called Jaaam (The Fresh Prince Remix.) His video art has become so popular that he was contracted by Disney to create several remixes for movies that they were producing at the time, such as Toy Story 3, Up, Pirates of the Caribbean and more. Surprisingly though, he earned more points on YouTube for his remix work than Disney/Pixar actually had on their own YouTube page.





(http://www.crayonbeats.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Front-1024x1024.png)




Although the contract was dropped, Bertke still creates music from remixing video sound clips, and he is continuing to influence other video artists around the world. Bertke’s own work very much relates to my own but also very much differs from it. I really like the way that he takes old cartoon clips and morphs them together because this is essentially what I’m trying to do, and I also enjoy how he put the videos to music. Though, Bertke has taken his artwork a step further by actually creating his own music to the video clips, and then essentially making a video off of that. Since I’m merely in the beginning stages of video making, I don’t think I’ll be able to advance to Bertke’s skill level but I really think that I can take advice from his collaboration of video clips to create a truly cohesive final video. Ultimately, it’s Bertke’s video skills that I’m really interested in within my own work, and morphing it with any type of music. With my own work, I want to continue incorporating the idea of having video clips match up with the beats of different songs, which is something that Bertke ultimately does.

http://www.pogomix.net



http://www.youtube.com/user/Fagottron

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAwR6w2TgxY (Alice video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4NCnH7RPZY&feature=relmfu (Jaaam (The Fresh Prince Remix video))

http://www.youtube.com/user/Fagottron#p/u/13/qs1bG6BIYlo (Wishery video)

http://www.last.fm/music/Pogo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bertke

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/business-being-diva/2011/jan/8/kickstarting-remixed-world/





Dainumo/Dustin S. Goodwin

(http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/252/49567193.jpg)



When I first started exploring the idea of mash up video’s that incorporated music and old cartoons or old media, I stumbled upon Pogo’s artwork, though through him I have also found another artist of interest; Dainumo. Dainumo is Dustin S. Goodwin’s stage name, and he is considered to be a “plunderphonics” artist, according to LastFM.com (LastFm.com.) His artwork incorporates taking samples from media clips and piecing them back together to create a new artwork. Essentially, Dainumo is taking the same ideas as the artist Pogo, though his results end up involving more movies than older cartoons such as Pogo’s work. Born in St. Louis, MO, Dainumo has taken clips from famous movies such as Iron Man 2, The Dark Knight, and Reservoir Dogs, as well as many more. There really isn’t much known about Dainumo, although his YouTube page has an email and number for booking inquiries.
Dainumo’s work, such as his remix video for the movie The Wizard of Oz, entitled, “Ruby Shoes.” This video incorporates clips taken from the movie, sound and visual, and results in a music video that sounds like pure music. One very interesting fact about this video that I find interesting is that the video is much more choppy than Pogo’s work, though the music itself is much more choppy too. Although, Dainumo did a great job of making Dorothy look like she was singing the entire song. There really isn’t any clarity to the words that she’s singing though, which is one of the reasons why I think the video and music seems so choppy.




The various concepts that Dainumo seems to be working with in his work is the collaboration of pieces of movie clips along with pieces of movie scenes to create final pieces of video art. Within each video that he makes I think the concepts for each change due to whichever movie he’s remixing. For the remix incorporating the movie The Wizard of Oz, it seems as though Dainumo is trying to present to whimsical yet mysterious aspect behind the actual movie, and by turning Dorothy into the lead singer instead of lead character transitions the entire piece of the remixed video. For instance he clipped a lot of scenes of characters dancing together which shows the joyful emotions represented in the original film. Though some of his other videos seem to incorporate concepts of the main sounds used within the film. For example, his remix video “Black Mambo,” of the movie Kill Bill shows a video that has shrieking sounds such as swords clashing, feet stomping, knives being thrown and any other weapon-based sound involved in the original movie. This makes the feeling of the video very rugged and frightening, even though it essentially still incorporates the same ideas that the original movie did.



Dainumo’s work is slightly like mine, although like Pogo I am interested in the way that he transforms different clips of the movies to parts of his songs so that it flows together smoothly. Within my own work I want to take music and put it with old clips of movies or cartoons to essentially give the video an eerie feel. I feel that Dainumo presents the opposite within his own work; by turning the dialogue in movies into lyrical songs he changes the meaning behind the video. Although I’m only in the beginning stages, I want to be able to somewhat incorporate the meaning that some of the videos actually bring in the beginning. For example, in the old Dumbo films, there was a lot of mysterious and somewhat disturbing, dreamlike qualities I want to add onto the final piece of the video and song collaboration. Although his work is really interesting, I think that I’m essentially only interested in the way that he mashed up the music with the video clips.


http://www.youtube.com/user/dainumo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDvPv69dCFs (Black Mambo video)

http://soundcloud.com/dainumo

http://www.last.fm/music/Dainumo

Mash up video sketch

Mash up video sketch

Pink Fantasia Elephants

photo work

Artist Post-Chris Saah

One of the artists that I decided to review on was Chris Saah. This former St. Mary’s College alumnus is a digital photographer who graduated with a philosophy major. Luckily I was able to have him as a professor this semester and therefore got a chance to really engage myself within his comments and work. Chris actually lives in Washington, D.C. but he traveled down here frequently to teach classes. After he graduated from the college he actually got an internship at the National Museum of American Art and then started working as a designer for different organizations and groups. His work actually involves the layering of several images together and then going through a process of mounting lights to create a deep space that seems almost unreal. By using tinted light Chris is able to create the perfect tone and hue for areas that he’s interested in exploring further through the photograph. In Photoshop he takes several images and starts to morph them together, washing out the color in certain areas and increasing it in others. This effect allows for his final prints to look surreal and as if they were set up. In a sense though, they were set up, which is one of the main things that I’m not too interested in. Although his final prints turned out beautiful, most of them seem to resemble a toy or put together stage for dolls. For example, in his print Displacement 12v, there is a lot of blurring of the foreground and background, and a meshing of yellow and brown hues that create an unreal depth to the photograph. It amazes me how just in Photoshop he can create a new landscape out of several, I just wish a lot of them didn’t look so staged.


Some inspiration that Chris left us with is to simply just shoot photographs and then make work out of your outcomes. I think that by this he wants his students to just have fun with the medium and to simply go and explore different methods and areas before even realizing what you truly want to work with. Overall I think that Chris’ method of working is quite different from me and my film photography, but I think it’s an interesting dive into the digital realm of photography. Even though I’m not a fan of digital work persay, I found his work to be a bit inspirational. The new worlds that he creates are evident of his philosophical background and the meshing of two or more spaces shows his exploration.

Artist Post-David Ellsworth

For my artist lecture, I wanted to do my post on David Ellsworth and his video work that was displayed to us in class. I wanted to go outside of the traditional artist lectures that are given on campus and focus on a more prominent artist that we are surrounded by each day. A little bit of background information, Dave Ellsworth lived in New York for some time before moving down here to Maryland. He worked as a film and TV editor at Broadway Video, Inc., which he says wasn’t the best job but it helped him learn the business. Working primarily with super 8 films, Dave says that Susan Sontag and her writings heavily influenced him. Although I’ve read many Sontag writings before, specifically On Photography, I always found it hard to understand and connect to, so it was interesting to hear that such a philosophical and theoretical writer influenced him.
One of the first videos that Dave showed us was a music video he had done for a band called tortoise. The video shot in 1998 incorporated a lot of repetition of images and it was all set to the rhythm of the music. One specific thing that I remember about this video is the humanoid feel that was presented to such manmade objects. I think a lot of this had to do with the pace of the video and how it seemed choppy and stop animation like. The second film that we were able to watch was a sort of documentary of a junkyard with moving machines and its general daily life occurring. Being about 20 minutes long really allowed me to see how much footage has to be edited down to create such a long movie. It makes me wonder about longer films and how people create 3 plus hours of footage. Being in the junkyard felt really machine like, not only because of the giant machines moving around but because of the sound. There was no real dialogue in the entire film except for when a worker starts to give a quick, short demand to another co-worker. All of the other sounds are the grinding and scraping of machines against metal, which can be a bit disjointing. I had never seen a short film like this before and I thought that it worked really well with the subject matter that was being recorded. Something like this isn’t too interesting to normally view, but in this context it seemed to become a way of life for everyone and everything around there. Later in the discussion David explained to us that this area is heavily involved with steel and other metal and the steel mill life in general. It really makes you see the area for what it is and how rarely we see areas like this.
One interesting fact about his work is that for the second movie we watched, he only used one mic and one camera. He had to move the shotgun mic around the area to capture the sounds from each direction, which allows for some footage to be pretty muted and other footage to be really loud. Also, he told us that to get into this area, he simply emailed the company and asked it he could do some footage. Surprisingly the company said yes as long as he wore the protective gear (hardhat.) This is a reminder of how if you simply ask someone if you can produce artwork from or out of his or her place, how easy that can actually happen. Overall, I think that Dave’s work is extremely interesting. I’ve never experienced film like this before and it really gave me inspiration to finally start experimenting with my own film. Being a photographer, I find it really interesting to see the movement behind all of the still prints that occur within life, and it seems like video is the one medium that can help capture it.


From his film Time, and the River.

Artist Inspiration for final project-Heather Ujiie & Bonnie Lane

For this final project, I found it really hard to find any inspiration from specific artists. I was originally influenced by Sally Mann’s work on her Deep South series of photographs that she took down in Louisiana and Mississippi, but I wasn’t sure of another artist that inspired me. Mann’s photos were one of the main things that I was interested in exploring further, simply because her “deep south” is almost like the deep south here, where there’s still a lot of negative, war history. Although I found her work to be inspirational, I wanted to find another artist whose work was related to my own. I found that there wasn’t just one artist that I found interesting, but many. The first artist that I came across was Heather Ujiie and her work “Ninja Warrior Face-off.” This work was a series of large digital prints that were on hung pieces of fabric. Her imagery that is used within her piece is influenced by a source far from my own, Kung foo movies and comics. Although the subject matter isn’t the same, the process was for me. I really liked how each of her prints covered the entire piece of fabric and allowed for a full bleed of the work. Also, I was inspired by the type of fabric that she uses, which is a very see-through, flimsy type fabric. It seems to resemble a sort of linen or mesh type material, but I couldn’t find out specifically what she used. Regardless, I found it to be really unique. You could see the images that were hung behind her prints through the prints in front, making each layer or section of work connect to one another. This is something I wanted to do with my artwork, have the fabric be sheer enough so the images outside could be seen on the inside, through the fabric. With this particular work, she actually embroiders the image with thread after she digitally prints it onto the fabric. Her method of stitching is far from what inspired me, but I really enjoyed how it added a handmade quality to each of the large hangings.




Another artist that I came across was Bonnie Lane. This artist has specific works that also involve digital prints on fabric. Once again, I wasn’t so much interested in her content but more in her process. Her work entitled Every Time You Sleep You Leave Me was a large digitally printed photo on sheer cloth of a sleeping person’s face. Her work also has a sound component of a person breathing while they sleep. Although she has a blue light cast upon the print from afar, her printing technique is very interesting. Like Ujiie’s work, she has printed full-scale photos onto the fabric and hung them in a setting where light can come through the print. Even though her light is artificial the concept still remains the same. Her work Are You Awake? also has large scaled prints but this time with actual text showing through the fabric with colorful lights. One thing that I really like about her work is the artificial light. I was most interested in natural light and how that plays a part into seeing the print like you would in the outside world. Though I think that the aura that colorful artificial light casts through certain materials is beautiful. It really creates a unique glow, especially with black text in front of it. I think that for any of my future project’s I could possibly project text through pieces of fabric with colored light to create this two-toned look. One quote from her that I found particularly interesting was My work is all about showing what I have experienced or known personally but I aim for the audience to be able to relate to it on their own level and somehow put a bit of themselves into the work and create their own story.” This is really how I felt about my work this time around. I knew that a lot of people didn’t know much about Point Lookout but I wanted them to have just enough history to make their own stories up within the context of the negative history that’s occurred there. Regardless of whether or not they’ve experienced it personally themselves, I think that my audience should be able to relate to it through the experience that they have when looking at my prints.





Although I didn’t really find one specific artist whose work was similar to my idea, I found a lot of artists who were all incorporating parts of my idea. I’m really glad that I got the chance to experience other artist’s work before actually creating my own so I had a clear idea of what would look unique and what wouldn’t. I found that using embroidery isn’t always the best option, especially on digitally printed fabric. I also found that projecting certain light through certain fabrics could create effects that no natural light could ever produce. Lastly, the aesthetic of each print was something that I found interesting within both artists. Each artist also have an extensive body of work, especially on fabric printing that I found to be really unique. Although most of the work is unlike mine, the colors, shapes and designs of each print are favorably unique.