Vue Infinite

Today I learned about this software: Vue 9.5 that animates 3D digital landscapes. I am not very into 3D landscapes at this point, I find them a bit bulky :) but I would really be interested to explore something fine and organic along this world, not for my final project of course, sticking to 2D for the time being. So this post is mainly dedicated for future brainstorming. Here are some of the software's presentations:

Alex Webb: More is more

Alex Webb's images have been called 'migraine photographs'. Geoff Dyer on the art of taking complicated pictures of complicated situations
Geoff Dyer
The Guardian, Saturday 14 May 2011
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USA. San Ysidro, California, 1979. Mexicans arrested while trying to cross the border to United States. Photograph: © Alex Webb/Magnum
Alex Webb is addicted to testing the limit of the load-bearing ability of his pictures: "It's not just that that and that exist. It's that that, that, that and that all exist in the same frame. I'm always looking for something more. You take in too much; perhaps it becomes total chaos. I'm always playing along that line: adding something more, yet keeping it short of chaos." This was in 2003; since then, Webb has found ways of piling on still more "thats", particularly in his images from Istanbul and Cuba.

Starting out, Webb's influences were Cartier-Bresson, Frank, Winogrand and Friedlander, and when he first worked on the Mexico-US border in 1975 he dutifully photographed in black and white – even as the terrain cried out to be shot in colour. But after a trip to post-revolution Haiti in 1986, he felt compelled to take on a massive additional complication. Politically and morally, an appropriate aesthetic response was demanded. "The world is a complex place and there are great dangers when you start looking at everything in terms purely of black and white."

So you start looking at it in colour.

The result: complicated pictures of complicated situations. When writing about difficult pictures or music or poetry, it's important not to forget, deny, or disguise one's initial (or enduring) confusion or perplexity. The purpose of criticism is not to explain away one's reactions, but to articulate and preserve them – in the hope that doing so expresses a truth inherent in the work. So it's reassuring that I am not alone in finding some of these pictures exhausting to look at. Dayanita Singh, the Indian photographer who took classes taught by Webb at the International Centre of Photography in New York, describes them as "migraine photographs".

Colour photography had gained institutional acceptance with William Eggleston's show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976. Webb was part of the second wave of American photographers working in colour. His essential contribution was to ask the simplest of questions: if you are interested in colour, doesn't it make sense to go where the colour is? In this regard, he was following the same logic as Van Gogh and Gauguin, in painting, when they decamped to the blazing yellows of Arles. Gauguin, of course, went further, to the tropics of Martinique and Polynesia. (I wonder, is Webb's photograph of pilgrims bathing in the waterfalls at Saut d'Eau in Haiti a kind of documentary composite of – and homage to – Gauguin's Tahitian masterpiece?)

Wherever he goes, Webb always ends up in a Bermuda triangle where the distinctions between photojournalism, documentary and art blur and disappear. Even in Haiti, when he is most obviously "a witness to history", he is forced to recognise "the pattern of my futile efforts at news photography… I had missed the February 'revolution' and the fall of Duvalier; now, in April, I arrived to calm…" The most newsworthy pictures are offset by others that suggest that what we are seeing is both old and news. Sometimes this temporal double standard exists within a single image. On one side of the picture is human time and violence; on the other, the animal time of the dog, sniffing around. His cities are palimpsests in which one world is constantly peeking into or giving way to another, through windows, doors, posters, fading layers of paint.

Webb has said of Mexico and Haiti that these are places "where colour is somehow deeply part of the culture, on an almost spiritual level". That's as may be, but his is a world where certain instruments and tools – a spirit level, for example – do not make sense (the Bermuda syndrome again). Within his pictures gravity is rarely more than optional. There are often people's feet dangling from the top of the frame, as if it's a branch they're perched on. Or else they're hanging midair, like cartoon characters in the blissfully oblivious seconds after they've walked off a cliff; or floating upside down and sideways, weightless as astronauts. One way or another, there's a lot of suspense in these pictures.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

hiraki sawa's "dwelling"

Thank you Matt for sharing! I happened to see this video piece in 2008 at Istanbul Modern, and for a reason my friends rushed me out (or was it closing time?) I never got the artist's name, few days ago Matt suggests seeing Hiraki Sawa's work, and I finally realized that Dwelling was a piece I have seen, brilliant work! I really like the whole context and animation.

wie wer leben (the way we live): nikolaus jantsch

Another good treatment of material I saw yesterday, from the Aurora Edition 1 DVD, Wie Wer Leben (The Way We Live) by Nikolaus Jantsch. I couldn't find the video online, so I might copy it later from the DVD and post it in here. But in the video, it was mainly the paint animated over low resolution videos, an organic way of dealing with footage.

All the above images were taken from Nikolaus's student page:

http://www.student.uni-ak.ac.at/s9957079/Nikolaus_Jantsch2/films.html

His description:

"The way we live is a film that faces the beauty, the pleasure with the difficulties of life. Sexuality provides us energy, it´s a sign of vitality. Bullfighting is a metaphor of life and death, the arena is a scene for risks and danger, courage and commitment of violence, all aspects that can be found in existence. Life is full of barriers that everybody needs to get over."

Year: 2006 - Duration: 7 minutes 40 sec. - Music: Stefan Löwenstein & Amir Abou-Roumie

blossom: sara bjarland

Still researching movement in animated shorts, here is a simple yet witty one by Sara Bjarland entitled Blossom:

Blossom from sara bjarland on Vimeo.

kaizer (kaiser) by kotaro tanaka

Several Kinds of movements in this video piece: the action happening in the scenes themselves and the pan movement that envelopes the whole actions. so technically, could it be final cut then clips imported to after effects and the camera is applied on the whole?

Kaizer from kotaro tanaka on Vimeo.

why the loops are slow and the marble doesn't roll

I had the time to reflect on the 3rd of May presentation, in response to one of the feedbacks I got:
- The main reason why the loops are very slow: that will give me more maneuvering time for the live version, the pace is not going to be the same in the show reel. The whole time issue will be synchronized along with the sound piece, once it is completed.
- I still didn't make up my mind regarding the marble, whether I want it to roll or to stay sliding, I think sliding suits more the surreal effect, the memory digging type of imagery, if everyone "expects" the marble to roll, why do I need to do that? as a counter argument, I could use the egg that doesn't behave according to the nature's law in David Bowie's video "survive", minute 0:32 (not comparing, he's great!!):

rotoscopes and memory, dream, and hallucination themes.

I was showing the presentation video to a friend today, and lately explaining what rotoscoping is all about, how it could help me generate visuals very close to reality, without having to deal with the actual real photographs, she gave me the title of a film that I just starting watching "walking life", it is available on the following link:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7583894250854515095#
After watching a part of the film, I realized that so far, most of the rotoscoped films that I have seen mainly employ this technique whenever the theme is memory, dream, or hallucination related, which again makes me build a triangular diagram between these 3 topics.

I am fearing a cartoonish feeling in the project, this is why I keep on requestioning whether there's any "cartoon" visual style in the loops I presented.

A scene from "Waking Life":

"A Scanner Darkly" trailer:

may 3 presentations feedback

Regarding the 5 loops I showed, the comments were the following:

Ed (livestream): I thought that it is very slow, I don’t know if that’s intentional, that’s my impression of this work, that it’s almost incredibly slow, if that’s intentional that’s fine, and that there are moments of disappointment, where I feel cheated, because of my expectations, but It doesn’t matter, in particular, when the marble slides down but doesn’t roll, now I expect it to roll down the building. There are certain things, this could be a matter of taste until the marble appears, like you expect the marble to roll, unless the artist intended not to roll it, but if it’s a gravity active upon this marble and the marble is sliding down the building then it has to roll and it has to be speed up and it has maybe to bounce when it hits the bottom, I think those details are really important, up until it’s all is very surreal, and because I have an expectation and it’s not fulfilled then I started to question the process which makes the audience member somebody who is no longer engaged with the art but somehow became critical in a negative way.

One of the face-to-face students asked the question (livestream): are they called loop because they will be repeated?

Jonathan (online):

Ed, associate lecturer, likes the surreal feel but not sure why the marble does not roll, it just slides.

Gabriele is asking whether they will loop continually.

Me: not really, will try to keep the elements separate so that I could mix the marble in another clip

Another question/suggestion from a face-to-face student: Depends if there are multiple screens employed? Is it going to be a multiple screen presentation?

Matt’s feedback: I like the visual style of Maya's work - the combination of photographs, textures and drawn images. I also like how she is fragmenting space and past/present. I think she may need to work more on the movement of these layers in After Effects, which at the moment feel quite mechanical and move at a similar pace. Having said that I am not sure how important that is as I know that this will be remixed further.

I really liked how the figures come up from the bottom in the fourth clip which had an element of revealing and surprise.

A face-to-face student (livestream) suggested I use another character?

(Livestream) hearing that quite interesting use of the space of the ladder scene.

Andrew: the people, there’s this kind of interesting structure and architecture, and then there are these characters that were introduced in an effort to populate the space, the images of people are almost dehumanizing, they’re kind of lifeless, they make the piece more lifeless somehow, because they don’t move and because they’re inanimate, the people make the piece feel more lifeless.

Suggesting a software, Markerless 2? You mask the character and it could track the character’s motion effortless, video cut out of people, in after effects.

Jonathan (online):

Multiple screens?

Movement issue like Matt said

The image on the wall with the ladder very good, almost real, as in real paint on the wall, several comments really liking this element.

Jonathan (online): observation - from Andrew - sometimes the people make it feel more lifeless because they don't move - but I think he is expecting video - rather than still images

A face-to-face student (livestream): But this is based on photographs.

Ed: My expectations are defeated because children should be walking.

A face-to-face student (livestream): I’m not sure whether these are stock footage or authentic image of Maya?

Same face-to-face student (livestream): I have the same problem, that is the lack of footage problem childhood, suggesting to film walking children and cut and paste my face on the material.

Jonathan (livestream) answers: it depends if you’re doing about childhood or your childhood.

A face-to-face student (livestream): The building and the 2 kids on it reminded her of Morris Mitchell's work, the use of upside down material and perspectives.

A face-to-face person, I guess Jonathan (livestream): It’s important that the artist creates his own footage.

A face-to-face student (livestream): It’s hard to animate from still images instead from videos.

Jonathan (livestream) clears the issue: Transitional digital objects: A fluidity in compositing an autobiography or a failure to create the portrait of the whole?

Suggests that’s a very good title, and that all the discussion is embedded in the title.

Christalla’s online:

Is it not always the case with art created with the artist personal meaning to it, if you don’t have reference to that person who is creating it then you really can’t understand the context of the work, so in this case maybe a bit of background material should be presented first.

pecha kucha presentation

Transitional Digital Objects - Presentation 1 from maya chami on Vimeo.