People Like Us

One thing that I’ve realized is that while I have a bit of a background and interest in sound I don’t have a lot of sound-related stuff on the ‘blog. I do have images and lots of film stuff, but not much sound stuff outside of more traditional music at all. I’ve been fascinated the last few days with a radio show from WFMU, “DO or DIY with People Like Us”
hosted by People Like Us who is Vicki Bennett. The show is a neat collection of offbeat music and collages created by People Like Us that I just love listening to.

I first heard People Like Us as part of the Illegal Art exhibition where her hauntingly beautiful track “Swinglargo” is included. I then saw the video “We Edit Life” that she was commissioned to make for Lovebytes. What she cuts and mixes together is clever and fun and with obscure references that I sometimes pick up and sometimes don’t, but always enjoy. She’s also profiled as a Featured Commoner as she’s a supporter of the Creative Commons project and is one of the people who suggested a sampling license. She has a very wide range of recordings available for download on her site, so you can listen and then buy some CDs. I’ve got to listen some more myself and buy some CDs. (But People Like Us also makes me want to do more with sound on my own too…the last thing I did was silent!)

November 18, 2003 , , , , , ,

Digital Dialogues

I’ve had the good fortune to be included as part of an exhibition at the Acadia University Art Gallery called “Digital Dialogues: connecting in art and science”. The exhibition was curated by Gair Dunlop who is a visiting artist from Scotland who I met in New Brunswick at the Atlantic Cultural Space Conference in May. One of the other people that I met there was Jan Marontate who thought that it would be neat to get Gair back here. Flash forward a year and a half later and thanks to funding from the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art Science and Technology, Gair has been back and he’s curated a great show that explores the area around here, which is next to the Bay of Fundy, and explores art and science, science and art, and it gave me a chance to explore some things I wouldn’t normally explore. The project was coordinated by the talented Janice Hudson who toiled away in the Peter Gzowski room with Gair. The amazing crew at the Acadia Institute for Teaching and Technology also were an integral part of the whole process and they did some neat stuff (as they usually do). This is just the perspective that I have looking from slightly outside the whole process, which always requires a lot of people to make something wonderful happen.

Circular Logic stillFor my contribution I took a series of 1005 digital stills to form a set of 7 loops around 3 locations in Wolfville. I would take a still, step to my right and then take another still and repeat the process from between 60 to 400 times. I then combined the stills together to form animated loops. Then I played with it in Final Cut Pro and made filmstrips that remind me of working with 16mm film. Finally I put it all together onto a DVD that I burned. It’s called “Circular Logic: 7 Loops in Wolfville” and it’s part of what I think of as the inappropriate use of technology. It involves using technologies is way that they aren’t really supposed to be used. It was a lot of fun. Eventually it will be up on the Web and I’ll let you know more about it and I’ve also got to go back and explore more of works as the opening was tonight and I didn’t get a chance to explore much. The show runs until September 24 at the Acadia University Art Gallery in the Beveridge Art Centre in Wolfville.

September 11, 2003 , , , , , ,

Processing Alpha

I’ve discovered a new environment for developing and exploring the possibilities of digital media. One of the problems in working with digital media over time is that if you change tools and as things evolve it becomes difficult to work with older material. The other challenge is that the tools that you use tend to push you in a certain direction. You don’t have to follow that direction, but it’s harder to swim against the current. I’ve used a bunch of different tools and I’m fascinated in how the history and evolution of tools can be embodied within them. As time goes by I notice how new tools always seem to have all the answers, but overall it doesn’t seem as if things have evolved that much.

Back in the old days when I started using version 4 of Director it was amazing…so much that you could do. Now the hot tool is Flash and it seems as though Macromedia is revising their product line using years to maximize the profit. Even though I’ve used a lot of versions of Flash, I’m getting tired of constantly updating. I’ve been thinking for years that there is a need for an open-source or free tool for developing things a bit more advanced than what you can do with other programming languages.

Now I think I may have found it in Processing, which was started by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. It’s designed to allow the exploration of programming more within the context of electronic art. What’s neat is that it is built upon Java, so when you’re done you export your work as Java and it can be placed on a Web page…no complicated plug-ins, etc. I’ve started playing with it and I hope to have some experiments up soon.

September 1, 2003 , , , , , ,

They Are Dynamic

Iamstatic is back with a redesign and new members. Featured works are by James Paterson and Randy Knott. I saw Randy’s “Don’t Forget to Remember” in a theatre on a big screen while at a conference in Moncton last year. It’s a great linear Flash piece that makes me wish for a perfect world where great work like that is shown in theatres … instead of the stuff that is usually shown there. It’s great to see Iamstatic back!

March 29, 2003 , , ,

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