Sunday, January 27, 2008

Video Vortex exhibition at Montevideo, Amsterdam

Two works made an impression on me in the video vortex exhibition, I saw on January 17th.

This image is a detail of P.T.S. (Public Television Sculpture),
the time-based installation of 8 videos seen distorted through 32 prism-like spheres in a circular cabinet by Dutch artist, Jaap de Jonge (www.jaapdejonge.nl)

Beneath these balls, which function as lenses, are eight hidden monitors. The video material was taken from 32 broadcasts, which were made for Park 4DTV (Amsterdam cable television) in 1996. New images and image combinations are created by the 32 prisms, all of which distort the image in some way or other. By pressing a button, the viewer can trigger the sound that accompanies each image.


The other memorable work was the film Flat Earth a film by Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead (view some stills here). It is a journey around the globe using visuals and material found on the internet.

music link of the week: Dave Thorpe Fantastic slide guitar! London folkie.
art link of the week: Simone de Jong Leiden artist who's website I came across



Vlogging workshop at Montevideo

Hitting Vlogging with a Hammer was the name of this workshop held at montevideo (Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts)



Their showinabox application is a way of showing good quality video in a format where you can have a lot of control. It is open source and works inside Wordpress.

http://showinabox.tv/



http://jaydedman.com Jay Dedman's wiki.

http://ryanedit.blogspot.com Ryanne's blog

http://ryanishungry.com Green video blog.


Saturday, January 19, 2008

music links

Listen to a section of Laurie Anderson's 2006 production Homeland on the Dublin Theatre Festival website.

Monday, January 14, 2008

Vlogging, a New Tube + Flash

Today I learnt a new word: vlogging, which means video blogging or a blog that uses video as its medium. For more this go to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlog and you can see that the word has apparently been around since 2000 and since 2005 there have been Vloggercons: videoblogger conferences.

I came across the word because I received an invitation to a workshop called Hitting vlogging with a hammer, and so before I could get the hammer out...

It is given by the Melbourne-based Aussie, media theorist: Seth Keen (www.sethkeen.net) and Video Defunct Collective (which is Seth + the programmer, Keith Deverell) see: www.videodefunct.net

I'm still not sure what they do exactly in terms of look and feel because nothing would work without QuickTime (oh those apple people) but they refer to their video-blogs as poetic interventions into vlogging.
I thought, well, the workshop's free and if there's space still, then I'll go.

The workshop is in the context of the conference: Video Vortex: Responses to YouTube (www.networkcultures.org/videovortex), coming up this week, but I've a paper on Making Community: a survey of some European Festival Websites to finish by Sunday for my own study.

In the Rhizome newsletter there was a link to a New Tube. Actually called New Art TV, (www.newarttv.com) an online "channel" of well-made short videos on contemporary art. Launched in mid 2007, by creator Robert Knafo, who used to be a writer and editor of various art and culture magazines such as Slate, Art in America and GQ, also the brains behind another online art project Studio Visit, the New Art TV mini-documentaries (5 to 15 minutes) include interviews with artists, curators, and collectors, exhibition walk-ins.

And... finally a note on flash. I'm very excited to be able to attend a workshop in February on ActionScript3 by Colin Moock (http://www.moock.org/) in Amsterdam. He is here as a guest of Adobe and the Flash in the Can conference (www.fitc.ca).

And while I"m on the topic on flash, I've been working on a new animation, only this time for broadcast (for a festival) and so have been experimenting to see if it is best to export a sequence of stills which I then import into Premiere or to export the animation directly out of flash as an AVI. Yesterday I came to conclusion that both methods seemed to result in equal sharpness on our television, so now I have to make a choice :)

All the above links are also on my delicious bookmarks.

Saturday, January 5, 2008

Frost + Snow in Leiden

A r-a-r-e event.
Sen, Tama and I went for a recreational walk in our neighbourhood.

This image is from one of the garden plots beyond the end of our cul-de-sac.

The hoar frost lingered for 3 days (20-22 December) and there are more photos here.

New Postcard

A new postcard of a recent sculpture by Sen and myself. More photos of this is here: www.sonjavank.com/crossp.htm


Or here: www.sonjavank.com/product2.htm