A Photo Comic of my installation film: production stills from the shoot of Everything Can and Shall Be Cut

March 10th, 2010
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Some stills from the shoot of one of the videos for my new installation “Almost Everything Can and Shall Be Cut”

1. a balloon animal in a helpless position

2. the balloon animal in distress

3. a wig is powerless to keep the scissors at bay

4. the fate of the wig: stuffed in a blender

5. wig, ravaged , posing with its instrument of death

6. the slow decomposition of jello

7. the ice-cubes are handpicked for oblivion

8. a cube of polystyrene foam is tortured with a needle

9. green goo oozes from polystyrene’s wounds

10. a steak is posthumously fed with intraveinous liquid

11. a circuit board fears for its transistors

12. circuit board yields its last colorful breath

13. a pillow besides its own stuffing

14. exposing pillow’s inner flesh

15. the pink heart of pillow’s insides

Kourtrajmé at USC: qui l’eut cru?

March 4th, 2010
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Gritty short films, music videos and docs from Kourtrajmé Productions, a Paris-based collective of emerging visual artists, filmmakers, actors and musicians.

Kourtrajmé Productions is a collective of emerging French and Francophone visual artists, filmmakers, actors and musicians. The brainchild of internationally acclaimed directors Mathieu Kassovitz and Vincent Cassel, this production house and artist collective has garnered increasing attention and acclaim after getting millions of hits on online sites like Dailymotion and YouTube. Founded by Kim Chapiron, Romain Gavras and Toumani Sangaré, Kourtrajmé produces playful innovations and cutting interventions in popular culture and society that represent the cultural dreams, lives and crises of transnational urban and peri-urban French youth today.

ZIMOUN’s sound sculpture: most haunting murmur of elegant electronic objects

March 4th, 2010
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Zimoun : Sound Sculptures & Installations | Compilation Video V1.6 from ZIMOUN VIDEO ARCHIVE on Vimeo.

Almost Everything Can and Shall Be Cut III: interactive mind map of my installation

March 3rd, 2010
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Conceptual Sketch

Dream World I: unusual feasts

March 1st, 2010
germinating ideas
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I’ve decided to sprinkle this blog with recollections from my dreams: you never know when an idea might felicitously insert itself. After a few memorable dreams featuring labyrinthine space stations, magical cats, rapid aging, giant cattle with no skin, day-glow animals, a never ending forest etc…it seems a shame to let these things slip by without a word. Last night was pretty epic: I was invited to a party given by members of a special mafia that trafficked in human urine. How this had made them rich was mysterious, but the thing that struck me when I entered the restaurant was that a room with a long low table and heavy red drapes had been set aside for the offspring. And all these children were little girls, very be-ribbonned and cream-puff, velvet and taffeta dresses, their yummy hair giving off a soft burnished glow. In front of each one was a fluted cup of multicolored blown glass, heaped with melting fruit and gelatin. Despite the splendor they looked uncomfortable.

I surprised myself by making this video this afternoon but maybe it wasn’t a non-sequiture after all: it describes exactly what that particular dream sequence felt like.

Almost Everything Can and Shall Be Cut II: jello’s screen test

March 1st, 2010
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screen test for my upcoming installation project “Almost Everything Can and Shall Be Cut” featuring one of its stars: jello in all its wiggly, jellyfishy glory. Other materials will include foam core, computer circuitry, ice cubes, wigs, balloon animals, steak, and furry pillows.

Floating Donuts and Pink Pipe Joints: preliminary models for my project to hybridize the novel and the playground

February 25th, 2010
germinating ideas
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These sketches are first steps towards a visualization of my concept of “ambient narrative”. In this case, the book being read is inscribed in the walls of a warren of floating inflatable tunnels (suspended like a octopus-shaped air mattress from a ceiling), in the form of pressure sensors that, depending on the visitor’s ensconcement in a particular branch of the structure, trigger audio recordings of a story. Each chapter of the book can be accessed in a recombinant rhizomatic way – literally the visitor travels through the story, using her body, its movements and its rubbing against the plush fabric of the tunnels, as the decoding instrument that allows her to gather fragments of the hidden text. The story itself, called “In the Dark: The Story of a Disapearance” is an existential mystery or detective novel that is pieced together by the non-linear meanderings of the reader.

“Almost Everything Can and Shall Be Cut”: my new installation project gets off the ground!

February 24th, 2010
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This two-channel installation piece examines the friction between texture and violence to bring us closer to the felt idea of flesh. The piece intends to question the relationship between affect and materiality, as well as the psychological economy of desire, destruction, and consumption by simultaneously making the viewer feel uncomfortable and viscerally involved.

Preliminary models:

A TV monitor presents us with a video of a hand performing different types of incisions using sharp and blunt metal instruments into a large array of materials. The monitor is covered with a loose “tent” of plastic sheeting, allowing the visitor a mysterious view of the video content through the blurring, glowing screen of the semi-transparent material. To get a closer look, the viewer has to unzip the tent’s opening and insert her head into an intimate space shared by the monitor.

The video is a loop of shot after shot of various texturally ambiguous materials or objects being clinically laid out on a chrome table while a hand, alternately gloved in vinyl or rubber gloves discovers the many methods by which each material can be cut up, destroyed, and divided and the specific instruments that do the job in the most satisfying or interesting way.

INCISION is preceded by a tactile prodding of the object followed by the MORCELLATION, FRAGMENTATION OF THE MATERIAL INTO ITS CONSTITUENT FORMS (filaments, bits, crumbs, slivers).The act of cutting can be smooth, swift : sensation of liberation, closure mixed with disquiet of violent end. The act of cutting can be difficult, messy, awkward: sensation of squeamish frustration. The viewer witnesses a Progression in the act of cutting: colorful liquid starts to OOZE out of the harmed materials (recalling old blood or water, displaying a viscous quality)

The second channel of the installation is rear projected onto a sheet of the same semi-transparent plastic wrapping that covered the monitor. The projection is a looping video of luridly colored organic textures (e.g. close-up of a beating heart, a time-lapse of growing mold). The video is processed into anaglyphic images to produce a stereoscopic effect, visible to the visitor with 3D glasses.

Sonic and Synesthesia: archaic utopia and toy emotion

February 18th, 2010
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As a child, I spent hours with my Sega Genesis or (Sega Megadrive, as it was marketed in Europe) developing digital motor reflexes meant to ensure my survival in a colorful 8-bit world. Rolling up in a little ball to zoom through transparent tubes or accelerate and fall in not-quite-Earth-gravity parabolas became second nature. Sonic introduced me to the delights of a sacharine electronic soundtrack that made the hard primary colors of Sonic world’s shimmer and subliminally controlled my minute pushing and pulling of the tiny joystick. Sonic is a masterpiece in synesthetic design: visual, aural and kinetic mesh together to create a re-embodied experience, more akin to telepresence than manipulating an avatar.

Apparently, other fans who still have dreams of pinballing through Sonic levels and have developped an automatic  jump and bounce response to hearing repetitive synth melodies  have posted these walkthroughs of Sonic 1 and 2…a nostalgic flashback to an archaic utopia.

Diana Thater’s Between Magic and Science: cameras and parlor tricks

February 18th, 2010
research
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Thater’s work in the past has focused on recreating abstracted immersive environments, using angled projections to transform the geometry of a space, often featuring the animal kingdom:

Diana Thater’s two channel installation Between Magic and Science deconstructs the magic metaphor that drives the myth of cinema and the cinematic apparatus. Not unlike an Andy Warhol film (Sleep, specifically), Thater offers the visitor the casual and yet involving spectacle of a continuous/reiterated gesture. In Thater’s piece, a magician keeps pulling a rabbit out of a top hat, an old cliché circulated in popular culture (including film and animation) that has become something of a symbol or archetype for the magic trick. In the first channel, Thater both dissimulates and exposes the magic trick by promenading the camera around the magician, an investigative motion that, however, repeatedly reveals nothing about how the trick is accomplished. In the second channel, the camera is static and records a “conventional” framing of the action, a tripod shot that references the illusory powers of cinema and its ability to create alternate realities out of “tricks” such as performance, production design, and montage. Both channels are commenting on the different persona or functions of the cinematic apparatus – the phenomenological or documentary camera (reminding us of Dziga Vertov’s kino-eye) and the camera of optical illusions and technological marvels, a device that traces its lineage to magic lanterns and the kinetoscope.

Diana Thater, Knots + Surfaces, 2001

The dramatization of this mise en abime goes deeper than these two asymmetrical mirrorings of the same action, however, since both channels are not projected in the installation space but inside an old Los Angeles theater, which is the footage actually projected for the visitors. Thater seems to be commenting on the layers of imaginary space that constitute the frame or screen of the cinematic mirage – just as the revolving camera is unable to unveil the mechanism or deception of the magician’s trick, so does Thater’s stitching together of the spaces represented in her two-channel piece appear seamless and opaque, hiding the layers of artifice within the totalizing control of the production.

Diana Thater, Between Magic and Science, 2010

And here, perhaps, Thater’s metaphor is too neatly tied up or packaged: the fact that her installation appears so convincingly to be a simple totality, in spite of the complex orchestration of its production, does not offer us a substantial or effective enough experience of the mise en abime she is representing in the piece. The work is more in the story about the work (including the thrilling tale of Thater’s acquaintance with a secret club of Los Angeles magicians) than the work itself, which makes the actual gallery experience a little anti-climactic compared to the curator’s introduction.

My films featured in the BLENDO show on hybrid animation

February 17th, 2010
project updates
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my films Remainder and Paroxysm are in a new show!

February 19th to the 27th, 5 to 8 PM in the SCA Gallery

“Squeaky Jaunt for Sci Fi”

February 10th, 2010
project updates
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My newest track of low-tech music. Enjoy!

I define low-tech and low-fi as a practice of jittery iterations – algorithms recode the same melody to create long looping ambient tracks. Anyhow, my idosyncratic use of the program Reason is responsible for the theory…still deep in the learning process.

FUN FAIRS AS MEGALOMANIAC SCULPTURE GARDENS

February 9th, 2010
germinating ideas, research
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Think of these rides as INTERACTIVE SCULPTURES : again, breaking down the false-ontological barriers between the cultural practices of high art and “low” entertainment. pop culture is the avant-garde !

Architexture VIII: Nam June Paik and dreaming about electronic ecology of future urbanisms

February 9th, 2010
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breaking down the ontological divide between the virtual and the material…another piece of interactive architexture to consider as flora and fauna for the electronic ecology of the future city.

Architexture VII: Peter Sarkisian and the spherical arcade

February 9th, 2010
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Peter Sarkisian, Extruded Video Engine n°=1. the impersonation of the arcade mentality! a new techno-animal emerges from this fizzing bleeping volumetric toy…

Peter Sarkisian at Volta NY
Uploaded by C-Monster. – Independent web videos.

Architexture VI: trampolines and mesh slides

February 9th, 2010
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I like the idea of using fabric to transform the geometry of a space: multiplying the possibilities for interaction yet flexible, mobile and eminently adaptable to other architectures

Architecture turned into enjoyment and participation.
instead of contemplating the void of the guggenheim museum’s central space,
JDS architects have proposed an experience which sees a trampoline net spiraling down
the institution’s rotunda. this idea plays on frank lloyd wright’s original scenography
for the guggenheim in which he envisioned patrons visiting the exhibition from the top,
downwards.

Ambient Interactive Architecture: dialogues with the mood of a collectivity

January 29th, 2010
research
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Responsive Architecture: in Dune, the space (a subway tunnel) is reconfigured as as an electronic interactive ecosystem, while Hyposurface emphasizes the tactile by creating liquid skin for façades much like the Vigo effect in Ghostbusters (when a depicted character looms out its painting). Call it ambient interactivity – there is a debate about whether an intelligent agent must be making decisions in order to qualify a system as interactive. But picking up on the presence, mood and sociality patterns of a crowd can offer a powerful aesthetic and relational experience. The wish fulfillment involved in the ability of objects, surfaces, and structure – the inanimate skeleton of urban life – to react and speak back to you in GESTURAL, non-verbal fashion is a ancient conceit. When inanimate objects respond, their human co-inhabitants start to experiment with different ways of relating to each other.

I Heart Tony Oursler II: trapped dolls with little pathetic faces

January 28th, 2010
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note to self: when thinking about video art and projection techniques, think SMALL

I Heart Tony Oursler: haunting heads

January 28th, 2010
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using techniques pioneered by the imagineers for their Haunted Mansion ride? a real breakdown of the virtual/material barrier, we enter a liminal zone where the virtual animates objects, ensouling them…

Oursler began working with small LCD video projectors in 1991 in his installation “The Watching” presented at Documenta 9, featuring his first video doll and dummy. This work utilizes handmade soft cloth figures combined with expressive faces animated by video projection. Oursler then produced a series of installations that combined found objects and video projections. “Judy”, 1993, explored the relationship between multiple personality disorder and mass media. “Get Away II” features a passive/aggressive projected figure wedged under a mattress that confronts the viewer with blunt direct address. Oursler’s works seem like animate effigies in their own psychological space, often appearing to interact directly with the viewer’s sense of empathy. These installations are consistently disturbing and fascinating and lead to great popular and critical acclaim.

Signature works have been his talking lights, such as Streetlight (1997), his series of video sculptures of eyes with television screens reflected in the pupils, and ominous talking heads such as Composite Still Life (1999). An installation called Optics (1999) examines the polarity between dark and light in the history of the camera obscura. In his text “Time Stream”, Oursler proposed that architecture and moving image installation have been forever linked by the camera obscura noting that cave dwellers observed the world as projections via peep holes. Oursler’s interest in the ephemeral history of the virtual image lead to large scale public projects and permanent installations by 2000.

The Public Art Fund and Art Angel commissioned the “Influence Machine” in 2000. This installation marks the artist’s first major outdoor project and thematically traced the development of successive communication devices from the telegraph to the personal computer as a means of speaking with the dead. Oursler used smoke, trees and buildings as projection screens in Madison Park NYC and Soho Square London. He then completed a number of permanent public projects in Barcelona, New Zealand, Arizona including “Braincast” at the Seattle Public Library. He is scheduled to complete a commission at the Frank Sinatra High School in Astoria New York.

(source: Wikipedia)

The Playground as Art Practice: Kinesthetic Art II

January 28th, 2010
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note how the documentation is edited to techno! The correlation with dance culture is a phenomenological one.