Archive - The Watermill Residency video | Open Studio | Maya Chami

Maya Chami | Open Studio | June 14, 2014 from The Watermill Center on Vimeo.
On June 14, 2014, Maya Chami presented three audio-visual works, Of Men, Champagne and Victory Aside (2012) and Transitional digital objects (2011) as well as a new work titled Jasmine - Tree: Copy Cat, inspired by The Watermill Center cat.

Born in Beirut in 1981, practitioner in graphic design and digital arts Maya Chami obtained a bachelor of science in graphic design from the Lebanese American University. In 2006, she was selected to participate in the UNESCO online masters module on art, design and technology, and in 2011 I completed her masters degree in digital arts at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. She works in graphic design and digital arts on both commissioned and personal projects and has participated in several design and digital arts exhibits and events.
Maya's portfolio of live audio-visual work includes “Transitional Digital Objects” (2011), which explores compositing an autobiography in live cinema; “Of Men, Champagne and Victory Aside" (2012), a live audio-visual presentation, merging laptop-generated visuals and live music in a playful examination into the theme of the ‘victory sign’ in the Arab world, from the 1980s to the present.

Test for "Jasmine-Tree: Copy Cat" Project - Foreground only

Test for "Jasmine-Tree: Copy Cat" Project - Foreground only from maya chami on Vimeo.

Research for "Jasmine-Tree: Copy Cat" Project 3

One of the most inspiring animated pieces that I got to watch last November (2013), it was shown either at Tate Modern: "Felix in Exile". South African artist William Kentridge mainly works with prints and drawings that he would draw and film frame by frame, topping up and sometimes (and this is awesome) erasing or smudging the actual drawing while filming. "Felix in Exile" is a masterpiece that have been created back in 1994, it still speaks today of the exile theme in the same intense way.

Fully black and white charcoal, the only 2 other colors used would be the blue for the scenes that include water and outlines in red, used as a marker line.

This is part of the summary that have been published on the Tate Website:
"Felix in Exile is Kentridge's fifth film. It was made from forty drawings and is accompanied by music by Phillip Miller and Motsumi Makhene. It introduces a new character to the series: Nandi, an African woman, who appears at the beginning of the film making drawings of the landscape. She observes the land with surveyor's instruments, watching African bodies, with bleeding wounds, which melt into the landscape. She is recording the evidence of violence and massacre that is part of South Africa's recent history. Felix Teitelbaum, who features in Kentridge's first and fourth films as the humane and loving alter-ego to the ruthless capitalist white South African psyche, appears here semi-naked and alone in a foreign hotel room, brooding over Nandi's drawings of the damaged African landscape, which cover his suitcase and walls. Felix looks at himself in the mirror while shaving and Nandi appears to him. They are connected to one another, through the mirror, by a double-ended telescope and embrace, but Nandi is later shot and absorbed back into the ground like the bodies she was observing earlier. A flood of blue water in the hotel room, brought about by the process of painful remembering, symbolises tears of grief and loss and the Biblical flood which promises new life. Kentridge has commented: 'Felix in Exile was made at the time just before the first general election in South Africa, and questioned the way in which the people who had died on the journey to this new dispensation would be remembered' (William Kentridge 1998, p.90). In this film Nandi's drawing could be read as an attempt to construct a new national identity through the preservation, rather than erasure, of brutal and racist colonial memory."

Watch the animated video:

Research for "Jasmine-Tree: Copy Cat" Project 2

Mostly rotoscoped, the video Klaatu's video "A Routine Day" (1979) makes use of this technique to reflect reality, and ultimately, the director's intention is to portray death playing vivified thought ghost effecs (multiplied transparency, fade out, morphing of the double decker into a canoe.

Research for "Jasmine-Tree: Copy Cat" Project

Researching early rotoscoping techniques for the "Jasmine-Tree: Copy Cat" project; Back in 1986, A-ha sang "Take on me", the video clip was directed by Steve Barron. The director uses the excuse of comics to make the characters come to life through the "rotoscoping" technique.

Codecs

I asked my friend, he's an editor, about the different codes and what works for what:

For people working with an HD format:

They could use the Apple pro res 422 if they file was worked on a mac, but this format is not supported on PCs, so if they someone with a PC wants to open the file, it wouldn't be simple, they will have to convert it, therefore, maybe loss of quality.

So another best solution would be a more universal codec, that would be the H.264, which he recommends for less worries.

Now in my case, originally, I wasn't working on an HD format. My video's specs are 1024 x 576, which is not HD.

But after deciding with Jonathan to have a split screen (on the same monitor, the edited clips and the looping edited version of the live), I will have to place both clips in an HD format: 1920x1080 since this format fits better 2 clips than the format I am using.

I will have to render my files in Final Cut Pro, then take both rendered clips to After Effects which, unlike Final Cut Pro, doesn't resize the clip once I change the file size, and do the split screen operation from After Effects, and again render to H.264.

The file's extension will be .mov (which the WD Media player accepts in my case).

We should have the work backed up on a DVD as well for the show, just in case.

WD Elements play for the show

This is the media player that I ended up buying, most of the electronics shop in Beirut do not sell the Western Digital brand, instead they would offer the iOmega. My friend told me that the iOmega she got was not working well and it caused several problems to include blacks when not needed and sudden stops in the middle of a video showing.
I finally managed to get one, this is it:
WD Elements Play, it is not heavy, supports most popular formats to include RMVB, H264, and MKV, works for full HD.
It takes the HDMI cable, but the cable will have to be bought separately.

File Formats Supported
Video - AVI (Xvid, AVC, MPEG1/2/4), MPG/MPEG, VOB/ISO, MP4/MOV (MPEG4, h.264), MKV (h.264, x.264, AVC, MPEG1/2/4), TS/TP/M2TS (MPEG 1/2/4, AVC), FLV (D1 resolution only), RM or RMVB 8/9/10
Photo - JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PNG
Audio - MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MKA, OGG, APE, Dolby Digital (inside video file only)
Playlist - PLS, M3U, WPL
Subtitle - SRT, SSA, SUB, SMI, MKS, TXT

Media Formats
AAC, MP3, JPEG, USB 2.0, Energy Star, Real Media, HDMI, SimplayHD, H.264, MKV, Dolby Digital

Package Contents

Multimedia drive
Compact remote with batteries
USB cable
AC adapter
Quick Install Guide

Chris Milk and the Johnny Cash Project

More storytelling forms, Chris Milk's project initiated before his Arcade Fire/Wilderness Downtown project, he had started brewing a web-based video, a memorial to Johnny Cash.

The project is on the following link:
http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/

And everyone could submit drawings for the clip on the following link:

http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/#/choose-frame

And the link to the Guardian article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2010/nov/01/johnny-cash-chirs-milk

D-Fuse Latitude_Redux

The details and the fragments.

"Latitude_Redux is a condensed extract from D-Fuse’s live sonic cinema performance Latitude. The screen is divided into two parts, which represent the multiple screens used during live shows. Latitude is inspired by the notion of drifting through the land and soundscapes of China and uses fragments of conversations, lights, and architectural forms to trace the multitudes of paths, identities and influences which make up the rapidly changing urban environments of Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing."

Latitude_Redux from D-Fuse on Vimeo.

cabaret voltaire sleepwalking

in this video, mainly the shots how they're all filmed à la home video style for the indoor scenes, the editing, and the rhythm.

rhur by James Benning

It was the first time that I heard of director James Benning, during the London Film Festival 2010, when I thought that in order to feel good about not being able to decide which film to watch, I could simply focus on one category, that of experimental films, and this is how I watched 'Ruhr'.

2 hours of selected scenes of this industrialised region in Germany, the film is dissected into 5 different chapters or scenes, each happening in one area of ruhr. It was interesting to see how a basic structure could construct such a powerful and moving film, even though all is happening in a very slow pace. A sculpture of Richard Serra arises in the middle of a composition and a man is standing facing it, trying to remove parts of a graffiti that has been sprayed on. Benning decides that this is a scene worth being stretched over a certain period of time, this is how we spend almost 20 minutes watching the worker water blasting a tiny part of the huge graffiti...

I was able to capture few stills (below) during the projection, this scene shows the tower of the world's largest Coca-Cola plant, a lot of people have found similarities between this scene and Andy Wahol's Empire State.

This is how the BFI introduced the film, I am pasting it below:

"James Benning brings his rigorous perspective to bear on the heavily industrialised Ruhr region in Germany.

In his first film to be shot outside the US, and the first to be made on high-definition video, James Benning brings his rigorous perspective to bear on the heavily industrialised Ruhr region in Germany. Constructed as a series of fixed frame compositions varying in length from seven minutes to an hour, Ruhr is in part a subjective portrait of a region, but more than this is an exploration of the relationship between landscape, work, culture and art. And as with all Benning's films, it's an invitation to interrogate the process of viewing and the creation of meaning. Each shot draws our eyes and ears to rhythm, repetition, sound, motion – nowhere more so than in the majestic sixty-minute view of the tower of a coke producing plant, where every ten minutes cold water poured into the base creates a cloud of steam to billow out of the building. Benning has long been a skilled manipulator of sound in his meticulously structured films; in Ruhr he takes this further, making subtle interventions in visual images and their temporal structure."

Director: James Benning - Country: Germany - Running time: 121min - Year: 2009

Stills I took with the iphone:

hollis frampton's lemon

Frampton on Lemon:
"As a voluptuous lemon is devoured by the same light that reveals it, its image passes from the spatial rhetoric of illusion into the spatial grammar of the graphic arts."



For more about this project, check out the excerpt in the abstract for the research paper, taken out from the book "Kinomuseum - Towards an artists' cinema" edited by Mike Sperlinger & Ian White, a 2008 publication:
http://mayachamidigitalarts.blogspot.com/2010/11/abstract-v-2-to-be-revisited.html

museum of london: LDN24 by the light surgeons

Visiting the Museum of London during this trip became like a ritual, an essential aspect of the journey, a pilgrimage almost. Situated between the Barbican and St Paul, this part of London is one of the most challenging, an area where every head move makes your sight stumble into another element that would lead you to understand a new layer about the history of London.

In the middle of the Museum of London, surrounded by infinite objects with stories about the x lord or the y queen, major events that scarred the history of Britain and created the modern London that we know. Right in the center, in the modest café of the museum, the Light Surgeons display their screens showing London, nowadays, shot from dusk till dawn. Screen is surrounded by a display of LED lights creating an O to embrace the screen, displaying information from digital data. I was more intrigued by the video itself. Having watched it over and over again, every time I would go I would pass by to check it out, I felt like every other time, the edits' pace stop becoming a series of sequences and starts following my rhythm as a viewer.

The idea behind the work is quite simple, London by day and by night, yet selecting what to show, the cinematography, and the sequencing of the clips is what mattered. A well deserved name! I thought in one of the visits, the light surgeons know how to scrutinize the landscape, and another time, after being stuck in the tube due to a passenger standing on the track, I reach the museum, look at the video again, and see that the crispness of the material is way to clean for the London landscape, maybe 'trashy' aspect of London doesn't show well?

The Museum of London is doing a great job I think (not that they're waiting for my applause), just in the room behind the café is another exhibit by illustrators Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones, their work depicts London in the shadow of the climate change (I will keep the details to another post). So time-lapse, again, is the core of this piece, done with perfection. I am posting below bits of how the museum introduces the work, it is beautifully written.

"LDN24 by the Light Surgeons"

"... The cinematography of LDN24 takes its inspiration from the still frames, tone poems and landscapes of filmmakers and photographers such as Patrick Keiller, Andreas Gursky, Koyaanisqati and Edward Burtynsky. But the Light Surgeons craft a dynamic exchange with the living city by marrying high-definition filmwork with a kaleidoscopic LED display which perpetually rewrites the London scene and prompts the audio soundtrack whose pulse is dictated by the currents of digital data.

LDN24, The Light Surgeons, 2009, © the artist

LDN24 follows a 24-hour day in the life of London with hundreds of filmed sequences from across the capital - framing the city waking, working and winding down on a giant plasma screen.

An enveloping stream of 35 real-time information flows around the LED ellipse producing an ever-changing map of the city. From tidal patterns to temperatures, flight arrivals to FTSE fluctuations, RSS feeds and live links to Google searches, partner news channels and Twitter keep an ear turned to the rhythms that compose the city. Software specially developed by the design studio FIELD choreographs the rituals and movements of London and Londoners into a compelling statistical dance."

http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/English/EventsExhibitions/Special/The+Light+Surgeons.htm

alphaville festival 2010

Friday 17 September, the alphaville festival running for 2 days debuted, the first day in Whitechapel Gallery and the next day in a venue "Rich Mix". The theme for this year's festival was "visionary cities".

'Our cities are in crisis and their futures depend on architects and urbanists who are willing to look beyond today’s realities to drive the direction for our increasingly urban world. Contemporary city design is full of obstacles standing in the way of visionary thinking. It is time for us to take a position on how we want to live in the future…it is time for a visionary city'. (from the book “Visionary Cities” by The Why Factory, 2009).

I wouldn't be able to describe here all the festival related events, it might come back in a later stage, instead I will be posting some of the enjoyable material.

That was the nicely worked teaser of the festival, it's worth mentioning that this is the 2nd year this festival takes place.

Alpha-ville 2010 Teaser from Alpha Ville on Vimeo.

And the screening program trailer:

Alpha-ville 10 Screening Programme Trailer from Alpha Ville on Vimeo.

Augmented (hyper)reality won in the competition

Augmented City 3D from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Requiem for Concrete - Mah Rana

JERWOOD: MAH RANA from THE LIGHT SURGEONS on Vimeo.

Collecting a kaleidoscope

COLLECTING A KALEIDOSCOPE: RALPH TURNER from THE LIGHT SURGEONS on Vimeo.

"Collecting a Kaleidoscope is an exhibition of 20 objects from the Crafts Council Collection selected by Ralph Turner, renowned curator, writer and former Head of Exhibitions at the Crafts Council from 1979-1989. Ralph Turner’s love of craft started during a childhood in a Welsh coal-mining town where hand-making was a necessary part of everyday life. He believes craft offers a timely antidote to our current global culture.

Through his very personal selection from a public collection we are offered an insight to the diverse and unique nature of contemporary craft and the breadth and depth of an exceptional public collection. The Light Surgeons interviewed Ralph Turner and filmed a selection of his own personal objects to produce the film accompanying the exhibition."

Directed by Martin Banks
Produced by Annie Kwan

dan black 'symphonies' video

The only issue that gets in my way when referencing a contemporary practitioner is the fact that I can't predict whether this artist/designer/writer will remain in the field. Who decides when is the right moment this person has become an established professional? I am so far convinced that I have the right to reference whomever/whatever I find suitable, but I am not sure of how this could be correct in the academic term.

On his website http://www.danblacksound.com, Dan Black has a bits and pieces page where he displays his avatars, among others the following:



Otherwise, I am still insisting on his 'symphonies' piece, only now I found its video below:

The word 'Symphony' is by definition 'an elaborate musical composition for full orchestra, typically in four movements, at least one of which is traditionally in sonata form.' Could be also 'something regarded, typically favorably, as a composition of different elements : autumn is a symphony of texture and pattern.' The feeling I get from listening to Dan's piece is basically a combination of both meanings.

JK Keller - or the guy who enjoys working!

I came across this video of JK Keller, a guy who decided to 'live his life faster' so he spent 8 years taking daily portrait photos of himself to assemble them in the below video. I am not saying that the originality of the idea is what is valuable in here, but the persistence and the perseverance. There is a sense of madness in what JK Keller does, not everyone has the guts to actually cross the bridge and do the action.

Living My Life Faster - 8 years of JK's Daily Photo Project from JK Keller on Vimeo.

So I went on checking out his other projects, it turned out he's pretty much involved in counting aspects of is life, archiving, categorizing... For instance this is another example of what he's practicing: 'Fingerspelling Matchbooks', 2005.



check out his website: http://www.jk-keller.com/

YAS get it right

It's year 2019, the launch of the first Arab spaceship, the 'star wars' style typographic introduction explains, I specifically appreciate the organic aspect, the shots of the vernacular and the non existence of the spaceship in this which I interpreted as a sweet type of mockery.

Inspiring Practices: Faraday_101 by Andy Stiff

Faraday_101 from Andrew Stiff on Vimeo.