leftover brainstorming - and an after effects trial

MPR feedback

Here are my colleagues feedback on my MPR.

I will be reflecting on the below information and post my comments soon.

Maya Chami: My research question ‚ 'foot kicking a ball: Narrative falling apart in the V.J.ing playground'‚ portrays the project I am developing: V.J.ing as an eye candy challenged into a narrative form.

I am interested in using the old habit of intermittent communication or my inability to tell a story in a shortcut way as a form in the narrative.

I am working now on narratives' 'leftovers' or the stories that come out and revolve around a theme, but not specifically portray it.

done

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): several comments here about how this is a similar project to Jean's, good idea to creae a dialogue between you 2

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): Jean asks, how is sound incorporated into this?

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): or is the plan to include sound at al

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): VJing is also repsonsive, reponding to the sound - like a DJ responds to the crowd....

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): so is VJing actually the right word to use at all

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): is there another term that can be used

Satbinder Kooner (skooner): can anyone explain VJing - sorry not familar with the term

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): what about looking at the history of hip hop to give a context

David Tatnell (davidtatnell): I like the autobiographical sense of a vj set - not entirely documentary but hinting more to memory flash backs

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): hip hop is also responsive, often to local issues, verbalizing what is going on

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): Jean - VJing is manipulating video in real time

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): but Jean also points out that VJing (VJ = video jockey) can be different in clubbing type setting rather than a cinema type setting

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): there is a feel of improvisation - influenced by what is going on around the VJ

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): the concept of 'input/output' is important to VJing, along with manipulation the footage you are working with

David Tatnell (davidtatnell): by taking it out of the clubs and into the gallery, how/will its context change?

Melanie Menard (m_menard): Do VJs normally work with D?J/musician (they agree beforehand on type of visual that match music) or usually completely separate ? If so, would you work with specific musician Maya ?

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): also Jean points out the differences between simply 'live editing' footage just creating a sequence, and manipulating for example by adding effects

Melanie Menard (m_menard): I thought Maya wanted to perform in clubs, but maybe I misunderstood

Satbinder Kooner (skooner): What will the content of the video be - what is it's focus?

Andrew Stiff (astiff): if thisnk this is an interesting dialogue that we are having here - the response mechanism within vjing - input and output and feedback

Andrew Stiff (astiff): how does this work within a narrative

Melanie Menard (m_menard): I think it's childhood memories but sort of abstracted + external images she relates to them for some reason ?

Satbinder Kooner (skooner): ok that sounds good

Melanie Menard (m_menard): (was answer to sat)

Satbinder Kooner (skooner): thanks Melanie

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): do you want this to be a performance in a club or a gallery or both - does this raise stylistic issues, what are people expecting in the different settings?

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): Chan, suggests the visuals in a club setting might not be the best setting if you wnat people to focus and give atention to your images

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): but maybe it is possible to make a club setting the right space, by thinking differently about how a visual narrative is constructed

Andrew Stiff (astiff): ok time .....

Andrew Stiff (astiff): thanks Maya - again many more questions

Andrew Stiff (astiff): definitely strike up a conversation with Jean

Maya Chami: thank you, i will!

Melanie Menard (m_menard): personal experience only, why not experimental music concerts? there's nothing much going on on stage (guy fiddling with machines) so they always look for VJs. SO you keep the not-art-world/festive setting, but people usually pay attention to the visuals and appreciate more, and are not so, hum, drunk or other :)

on another note, Matt emailed me his feedback, here it is:

Hey Maya these were my thoughts on your project...

- What is it that makes this medium eyecandy? This seems to be an easy trap
to fall into - how can this be avoided?
- Can there be certain sections of the narrative that are ‘corner stones' or
repetitions through which the non-linear parts happen?

- Maybe look more into the idea of memories and how these can be visualized.
How memories distort/ mix/ fade/ abstract/ fragment over time.
- Maybe look more into the concept of time in relation to memory and also
film theory.
- Play with time and pace - Run shorter clips alongside/ over the top of
longer clips? Check out...
- Vertov – Man with a movie camera (sequences layered on top of each other)
Able Gance - Napoleon (running narratives Simultaneously alongside each
other/ triptic)

MPR Presentation

My research question ‘A foot kicking a ball: Narrative falling apart in the V.J.ing playground’ portrays the project I am developing: V.J.ing as an eye candy challenged into a narrative form.

Up to this point, I was concerned with realizing what made me decide using V.J.ing as the medium of my project. I was questioning V.J.ing as a form of digital moving image and the restrictions that are natural extensions of this technique, having the scenes extracted to one minute each so that the software does not fail on the performer during practice.

I found out that my past habit of intermittent communication or my inability to tell a story in a shortcut way, played a main role in the decision-making, leading to a higher interest and deeper research in narrative styles in digital moving image, and later on to an appreciation of the idea of narratives’ ‘leftovers’, or the stories that come out and revolve around a theme, but not specifically portray it, this point liberated the way I am looking at my project.

Across the many theoreticians/practitioners I have visited so far, I have came across 4 main influential and inspiring ones:

- Lev Manovich’s ‘Soft Cinema’ project > database as a main essence

- Lev Manovich’s ‘Deep Remixability’ theory > software like species within the common ecology, once released, the start interacting, mutating, and making hybrids

- DJ Spooky in his album ‘The Secret Song’ > sampling as a collage, an art practice based on centuries taking out text out of context...

- Mark Amerika in his ‘Cyberfictions’ > working on expanding the concept of writing to include multimedia formats; starting with a written then trying to locate different kinds of audiences whether through the Internet, in nightclubs, museums, galleries…

- Laura Marks in her ‘Haptic Visuality’ theory > intercultural films and video allow the viewer to experience cinema as a physical and multi-sensory embodiment of culture, not just a visual representation of experience.

At this point of the course I became convinced that theory leads practice, and that ideas come out of theory. With the technical background I have, any software would become accessible.

I wish to explore the concept of fragments further. Being able to construct scenarios from any picture or scene is giving your audience the liberty to imagine instead of spoon-feeding. I should be expanding further the research on performer / audience in relation to participation.

What I will be doing next:

- Continuing the research on the breakdown of narrative in digital moving image.

- Looking more at narrative techniques, and have written narrative sequences as a start that will be the support to build up from.

- Start filming, editing, animating and going back to archives of memorial places.

- Developing loops and get myself a training with a practicing VJ before the middle point of Unit 2.

Raising questions about how will the leftover idea be clarified, what kind of footage will I be taking into consideration, the length of the V.J.ing show, is it too obnoxious for a performer to project herself on the screen, why will I go into a domain that does not fit in the mainstream?

To check the beginnings of written narrative along with a mood board experiment please check the below presentation:

Lev Manovich: From Sketchpad to iPad

(from the new expanded version of Software Takes Command currently in preparation)
April 3, 2010

I started putting Software Takes Command book together in 2007. Today is April 3, 2010, and I am doing final edit on the book's second chapter called "Understanding Metamedia." Today is also an important day in the history of media computing (which starts exactly 40 years ago with Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad) - Apple new tablet computer iPad went on sale in the U.S. During the years I was writing and editing the book, many important developments both made Alan Kay’s vision of a computer as the “first metamedium” more real – and at the same time more distant. (I am referring in particular to the text in Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, Personal Dynamic Media, IEEE Computer. Vol. 10 No. 3, March, 1977. At the end of this article, Kay and Golderg call computer “a metamedium” whose content is “a wide range of already-existing and not-yet-invented media.”)

The dramatic cuts in the prices of laptops and the rise of netbooks – together with the continuing increase in the capacity and decrease in price of consumer electronics devices (digital cameras, video cameras, media players, monitors, storage, etc.) brought media computing to even more people. With the price of a netbook many times smaller than the price of a digital TV set, the 1990s arguments about the “digital divide” became less relevant. It became cheaper to create your own media than to consume professional TV programs via industry’s preferred mode of distribution. More students, designers and artists learned Processing and other specialized programming and scripting languages specifically designed for their needs – which made software-driven art and media design more common. Perhaps most importantly, most mobile phones became “smart phones” supporting internet connectivity, web browsing, email, photo and video capture, and a range of other media creation capabilities – as well as the new platforms for software development. For example, Apple’s iPhone went on sale on June 29, 2007; on July 10 when the App Store opened it already had 500 third-party applications. According to Apple statistics, on Marc 20, 2010 the store had over 150,000 different applications and the total number of application downloads reached 3 billion.

At the same time, some of the same developments strengthened a different vision of media computing – a computer as a device for buying and consuming professional media, organizing personal media assets and using GUI applications for media creation and editing – but not imagining and creating “not-yet-invented media.” Apple’s first Mac computer released in 1984 did not support writing new programs to take advantage of its media capacities. The adoption of GUI interface for all PC applications by software industry made computers much easier to use but the same time took away any reason to learn programming. Around 2000, Apple’s new paradigm of a computer as a “media hub” (or a “media center”) - a platform for managing all personally created media - further erased the “computer” part of a PC. During the following decade, the gradual emergence of web-based distribution channels for commercial media, such as Apple iTunes Music store (2003), internet television (in the US first successful service was Hulu publically launched on March 12, 2008), e-book market (Random House and Harper Collins started selling their titles in digital form in 2002) and finally Apple iBook store (April 3, 2010), together with specialized media readers and players such as Amazon Kindle (November 2007) have added a new crucial part to this paradigm. A computer became even more of a “universal media machine” than before – with the focus on consuming media created by others.

Thus, if in 1984 Apple first Apple computer was critiqued for its GUI applications and lack of programming tools for the users, 2010 Apple iPad was critiqued for not including enough GUI tools for heavy duty media creation and editing – certainly a step backward from Kay’s Dynabook vision. The following quite from iPad review by Walter S. Mossberg from Wall Street Journal was typical of journalists’ reactions to the new device: “f you’re mainly a Web surfer, note-taker, social-networker and emailer, and a consumer of photos, videos, books, periodicals and music—this could be for you.” New York Times’ NYT's David Pogue echoed this: “The iPad is not a laptop. It's not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it's infinitely more convenient for consuming it - books, music, video, photos, Web, e-mail and so on.”

Regardless of how much contemporary “universal media machines” fulfill or betray Alan Kay’s original vision, they are only possible because of it. Kay and others working at Xerox PARC build the first such media machine by creating a number of media authoring and editing applications with a unified interfaced, as well as the technology to enable machine’s users to extend its capacities. Staring with the concept which Kay and Goldberg proposed in 1977 to sum this work at PARC (computer as “a metamedium” whose content is “a wide range of already-existing and not-yet-invented media”) in this chapter we will discuss how this concept redefines what media is. In other words, we will go deeper into the key question of this book: what exactly is media after software?

drafting personal narratives

Narrative drafting, a trial for the project story line. Feedback is welcomed.

Leftovers of images from my iphone

Leftovers of images taken with my iphone, they fit nowhere in the images folders, maybe under one new category untitled 'leftovers'. Considering using leftover images as part of the project. Will elaborate more later.

Soft Cinema: Navigating the database

Soft Cinema, the DVD by Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky encloses 3 ‘films’: ‘Mission to Earth’, ‘Absences’, and ‘Texas’. The films are based on database of videos, visuals, soundscapes, music, narratives, voice overs…

Then a software in real time was created enabling two major factors to manipulate the database: human subjectivity and the variable choices made by this custom software. As a consequence, the films can run infinitely without ever exactly repeating the same sequences, layouts of the screen and narratives. The result is Soft Cinema, or a cinema that fits the information age. Twentieth century cinema was too reflective of the industrial age since in form it consists of an engine that drives movement and the electricity that powers it. The role of the database and the digital computer is not visible in twentieth century cinema, so this is where this project intervenes.

Lev Manovich, in the catalog accompanying the DVD, asks how can new media narrative take into account that its elements are organized in a database? How can new abilities to store vast amounts of data, to automatically classify, index, link, search and instantly retrieve, lead to new kinds of narratives?

The Soft Cinema software is not to be praised as the main achievement of this project. The narrative in the films were inspiring, reflective of the current world of layering, traveling, instant messaging, the sentences are detail oriented, you would hear the voiceover saying ‘the woman kept eating, she did not take off her sunglasses, so the pieces of chicken looked purple, almost violet, but they tasted ok, after she poured some soya sauce on them’ and others like ‘the car wash was her favorite scene in the world, she did not remember when this passion started exactly, the brushes attacking the front window of the car like the legs of a giant octopus’.

To navigate the actual database, visit the website: http://softcinema.net/?reload

Dissecting and Structuring

So here's the first attempt of dissecting my project. I have worked on the different areas that I might be looked at (at this stage). Dissecting the whole project came out easy, it was taken directly from the deciphering of the research question. The research question being the following:

A foot kicking a ball: Narrative falling apart in the V.J.ing playground.

Remixing ‘Deep Remixability’: trying to get it right

INTRODUCTION:

I was pretty much amused by the political aspect of the essay ‘Deep Remixability’, if we fail to perceive it this way then we might face a problem understanding the social aspect of media today.

After having mentioned DJ Spooky’s vision of sampling and its importance as an art practice in one of the chat sessions, Andy pointed out that I should be looking at the concept of ‘deep remixability’ by Lev Manovich as the next development on the form of sampling.

Having read the essay, I decided that it would require another reading to really grasp the essence, so the next time I read the article, I decided to take notes for myself in order to follow the thread of the author’s thoughts.

‘Deep remixability’, the essay, mainly discusses the new hybrid language of moving image that emerged during the period of 1993-1998. 1993 is the year Adobe launched their software After Effects, the application that enabled people (from all levels) working in media to produce commercials, music videos, motion graphics, TV graphics and other types of short non-narrative films and moving image sequences in a hybrid form.

Hybrid has become the norm, Manovich argues since with After Effects one can do a lot of things: editing, designing, compositing, creating special effects, animating… all on a desktop computer or a laptop.

BRIEF HISTORY:

Manovich refers to the ‘Velvet Revolution’ that happened when Central and Eastern Europe peacefully liberated themselves from the Soviet Union. ‘Velvet Revolution’ the term came to express the smoothness of the transformation, that of the velvet smoothness.

He uses this metaphor to explain the aesthetics resulting from the transformation in moving image.

NEW CULTURAL LANGUAGE:

Different media met within the same digital environment, they interacted in a new way that did not exist before and that could not be imagined or predicted ahead before the invention of the algorithmic language. Now with algorithms, all the data became digital, so the different file formats became compatible with every other software, and this is where the new language of the hybrid emerged based on the logic of remixability.

Having set that the logic of the new hybrid language is that of ‘remixability’, not only of the content of different media or simply their aesthetics, but their fundamental techniques, working methods, languages, and assumptions. All the moving image categories, when united under the common software environment, they create a new metamedium.

The work produced in this new metamedium cannot be referred to as ‘remediation’, since what the computer does is simulate all media, not only its surface appearance, but also the techniques used for their production and the methods of viewing and interacting with the work in these media.

The author argues that After Effects constituted a new stage in the history of media, with new aesthetics and the production of new media species, based on the interaction of the different media in the same software environment (typography with 2D animation and cinematography for instance in the same melting pot being After Effects). The end result is ‘new cultural species’ in Manovich’s words.

TECHNIQUES AND PARAMETERS CHANGE:

Digital compositing was essential in enabling the development of the new hybrid visual language of moving images. Its original mission was to support the aesthetics of cinematic realism; instead it liberated the many media from the fake (or fluent) flow and enhanced the visibility of the mixes. This is how it enabled media ‘remixability’ and soon became a ‘universal media integrator’.

Its importance lies in the fact that it transformed the basic unit from ‘frame’ to ‘visual elements’. Manovich uses the After Effects’ interface again to argument the shift from ‘time-based’ to ‘composition-based’. In this software, visual elements are placed in the composition windows, these elements can be manipulated and conceptualized as independents objects that could be accessed, revisited and edited back endlessly. Therefore, the main issue that this software is suggesting is space as opposed to time, in the author’s words.

He also refers to cinema in the modern times, how it was perceived as a series of photos placed in a sequence, when projected create the effect of motion. This is where the term ‘moving pictures’ or ‘moving image’ come from. Since today all media are conceived differently (being created in either a 2D or 3D worlds), contemporary terminology that defines moving image would become: ‘modular media composition’.

To recap, hybridization is not:

- A simple mechanical sum of the previously existing parts, it is new species being generated

- Simply adding the content of different media or adding together their techniques and languages

- A simple remix as it is commonly understood in contemporary culture

This is where the term ‘deep remixability’ emerges.

Effect is simulated and removed from its original physical media (that of fluent realistic effect in cinema realism) >> manipulation could be happening in many ways (since it’s now based on visual elements instead of a frame) >> parameters are independently animated (one could change an animation for instance over time) >> numbers are controlling the algorithm >> simulated depth of field maintain the memory of the particular physical media which it came from >> it becomes a new technique which functions as a character in its own right >> it has fluidity and versatility that did not exist previously >> ambiguous relation to the physical world.

SOCIAL FACTORS THAT LEAD TO ‘DEEP REMIXABILITY’:

The author names the following factors:

- The rise of branding

- The experience of economy

- Youth markets

- Web as a global communication platform

These factors are not enough to lead to the new aesthetics, instead he would mention a fact being ‘softwares used in production environments are not set out to create a revolution; they are created to fit in already existing procedures, job roles and familiar tasks.’ This is were the result to ‘deep remixability’ shapes:

‘Software are like species within the common ecology, once released, the start interacting, mutating, and making hybrids.’

CONCLUSION:

The essay is beautifully ended by the conclusion below:

‘Following the Velvet Revolution, the aesthetic charge of many media designs is often derived from more ‘simple’ remix operations - juxtaposing different media in what can be called ‘media montage.’ However, for me the essence of this Revolution is the more fundamental ‘deep remixability’ (...). Computerization virtualized practically all media creation and modification techniques, ‘extracting’ them from their particular physical media and turning them into algorithms. This means that in most cases, we will no longer find any of these techniques in their pure original state.’

The article could be found on the following link:

http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/pubsfolder/manovichessay/

BAA - British Animation Awards

I got the chance to watch the 7th edition of the British Animation Awards screening at BFI Southbank two weeks ago. I was always a fan of the logo and the acronym of the festival, BAA for British Animation Awards integrated in a sheep icon-based logo, imitating the sheep's bleats.

This post is not about the logo though, it should be about the animated shorts, or a quick reflection on animation in general.

Abstract shapes animated, character illustration, digital drawing using a digital pen or even a mouse, hand drawings rendered using photoshop, ink based drawings, objects photographed and animated following the stop motion techniques, photographs captured then animated using the many layers techniques; every participant seemed to be fascinated with his/her chosen technique. The problem though was sometimes the discrepancy between visuals and the theme or the visuals and the narrative, a brightly written poem that contained a lot of interesting imagery (metaphorically) was portrayed visually in a too literal way, wiping out the margin for the viewer to imagine really. Other times an interesting animation fails to deliver a message, or even a feeling beyond 'interesting visuals', which could be a true disappointment, especially that there is talent, so why not use the help of an author or a creative writer to adjust the whole mission altogether?

And my second concern was the 'cute' phenomenon; the after taste of some of the screenings was mainly lightness, specifically that of 'if the animated short doesn't make the audience laugh or smile it won't harm them.'

Some grand interventions like 'Speechless' by Daniel Greaves and 'Yellow Belly End' by Philip Bacon' (from the 2 out of 3 days program I have attended), and I really like the fact that this festival has been running for 7 years now, it is something to look forward to.

For more information: http://www.britishanimationawards.com/