Bumblephone: fantasy on echoes and voices

August 24th, 2010 project updatesTags: city, experimental circus, haunted space, machine

Bumblephone is a design for a large scale interactive installation. Collaborators: Lauren Fenton, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Veronica Paredes, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, and Laila Sakr. It was originally proposed for IndieCade’s Temporary Installation 2010 in Culver City.

In Bumblephone participants speak to each other through giant phonograph-shaped flower pods, triggering a mischievous aural remix that blends their intimate interactions with the ghostly sounds of cinematic and videogame history. Composed of four fluted canopies that hang from a central stalk, the piece is designed to evoke experiences of intimacy, memory, and a playful rearrangement of history. Visitors can whisper to one another through tube-like apparatuses that resemble the reproductive organs of a flower.

When someone speaks into one of the tubes, the “organism” interjects by echoing back the participant’s words and mixing real-time communication between visitors with sound segments composed of memorable lines, refrains, sound effects, and dialogues culled from histories of cinema and video games. In massaging these soundtracks into a dialogue with its visitors, Bumblephone gives rise to delightful surprises, stimulating confusions, and uncanny presences. By designing these flower-shaped objects to be suggestive of multiple forms — a camera, a projector, a telephone, a phonograph-horn, and an interactive organism — we encourage visitors to think about the ways that various technologies tend to absorb and respond to one another.

We will assemble the frame of this evocative structure using aluminum tubing for the supportive structure and lighter PVC and wire for the sound flowers. A central pole will be secured by four tension cables, supporting a hollow aluminum platform, in which a laptop and a mixer will be housed. A hollow aluminum ring circles the platform, connecting the two curved aluminum tubes that serve both as support for the flowers and carriers of sound from flower to flower. Visitors speak into a microphone that amplifies the sound within the tubes and also records their speech, prompting the Voce speech recognition platform to decode participants’ utterances — looking for keyword matches within a library of lines from noteworthy films. A positive recognition will trigger a Processing program to playback sound from these particular filmic moments. In addition, sound recognition sensors will trigger the Processing program to translate the participants’ voices into sound effects from a library that includes classic video game sounds.

The sound flowers themselves will be assembled using thick copper wire sheather in clear colored PVC tubing, while their decorative buds/stems that link them to the aluminum structure will be composed of molded PVC. To make them sound proof, clear vinyl upholstery fabric will cover the flowers’ wireframe.

Almost Everything Can and Shall Be Cut: playtesting an installation

April 6th, 2010 project updatesTags: ambiance, architexture, experimental circus, haunted space, indexicality, material, photopia, visceral

shots from a playtest of my installation, Almost Everything Can And Shall Be Cut – a next iteration will involve layering the plastic sheeting to produce stereoscopic effects when the second channel video is projected. For the first video displayed on the monitor, I’m thinking of setting up the plastic tent in a stairwell.

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

March 10th, 2010 project updatesTags: architexture, body, cyborg, experimental circus, haptic, inanimata, material, photopia, uncanny, visceral

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

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

March 3rd, 2010 project updatesTags: body, experimental circus, inanimata, noise, play, uncanny, visceral

Conceptual Sketch

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

March 1st, 2010 project updatesTags: experimental circus, haptic, inanimata, noise, uncanny, visceral

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.

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

February 24th, 2010 project updatesTags: architexture, body, detournement, haunted space, inanimata, material, photopia, shock, uncanny, visceral

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.

My films featured in the BLENDO show on hybrid animation

February 17th, 2010 project updates

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 updatesTags: city, music

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.

Ceremony Around a Fire Hydrant

January 27th, 2010 project updatesTags: city, experimental circus, haunted space, music

my newest piece of low-tech music – enjoy!

Ceremony Around a Fire Hydrant from Lauren Fenton on Vimeo.

Featuring my short animated film “Remainder” …

May 13th, 2009 project updatesTags: architecture, city, contingency, haunted space, music, photopia, remainder

NO/PLACE_edits #3

March 29th, 2009 project updatesTags: ambiance, city, derive, haunted space, infrastructure, music, photopia, trap, uncanny

New edits for my animation short “NO/PLACE’, still using proxy music (mixes of Aphex Twin tracks) – this time adding sound effects.

The clips look better if you chose the HD option on the Youtube toolbar!

NO/PLACE: first animated edits

March 27th, 2009 project updatesTags: amnesia, derive, haunted space, photopia, uncanny

First animation edits for “NO/PLACE” using proxy music – including one styleframing the live-action actor.

Music used: Aphex Twin

N0-PLACE / U-TOPIA : second articulation of an animation project

March 13th, 2009 project updatesTags: Amy Kravitz, architecture, city, contingency, haunted space, immersion, infrastructure, mapping, maze, music, noise, photopia, space, trap, uncanny, utopia

The city we walk through everyday is not necessarily the city we experience. The urban landscape we experience is colored by our goals and projects, subordinated to the destination we are moving towards. We tend to blank out or forget the real space of the city, a often inexplicable space created by the various forms of infrastructure that are the bare bones of our urban lives. This short film recreates our sensation/perception of these “forgotten” spaces when we chose to focus on them, to really feel the contours of their existence. Although these different urban landscapes have different moods or atmospheric connotations, they all share the same capacity to both suck in and repulse our attention. Both omnipresent and indefinable/unnamable, this infrastructure-landscape creates a sensation much like falling down a well or becoming lost in a maze, as the mind loses all points of reference and is engulfed by/trapped in undiluted space.

Photographic stills of urban spaces representing freeway underpasses, unidentifiable buildings, passages, unplanned-for vegetation, pipes with no immediately visible purpose, walls, fences, or placing in the same space elements that are physically contiguous but semantically unrelated, such as a row of windows in a building and the tree growing in a parking lot next to it, or the sidewalk corner that randomly unites two structures are woven into each other in an editing style strongly reminiscent of Amy Kravitz’ piece “Trap” in which patterns of light and shadow alternate and flow into each other in order to create (for me, at least) an abstract, mysterious, elusive space that hypnotizes the viewer and thwarts/encourages her attempt to find a form of fragmented meaning in the seamless changeability of the images. The infrastructure space I aim to create is not as abstract as that, since the shape of the elements that are represented will be visible, although, in the spirit of “Trap”, cut up and disjointed, thrown out of physical/topological context. However, the nature of the spaces represented i.e. the fact that no clear “object” of representation but only shape, line and texture will be truly identifiable in the frame should contribute to the viewer’s same sensation of being lost, even dizzy, that she gets from watching Amy Kravitz’s piece. In addition to using Kravitz’s technique of blending/ fading in and out frames to create this effect, I anticipate using lighting effects in After Effects, for example, having stripes of light or spotlights flow over the images, much like in Pistachios’ “Curare Bulgari” piece.

To add dramatic buildup to the piece (which Amy Kravitz’s piece perhaps lacks) I will interrupt the flow of photographed infrastructure with short segments of live action (5-10 seconds), in which a mime, using a combination of gestures (mostly upper body) and facial expressions will introduce to more jarring and explicit effect the sensation of mental distress/discomfort that one feels when confronted with the emptiness and “semantic insufficiency” of these spaces.  As the piece progresses, these interludes will become more frequent, more brief and the gestures and lighting will become more intense. In terms of the gestures, more intense does not necessarily mean more contorted or frightening, but less controlled, perhaps even more passive, as if one had finally surrendered to the space represented. In terms of lighting, this will mean a gradual stepping up from flat to very contrasty (the mime mostly in shadow, along with the background, except for part of her face brightly illuminated). The progression of the “mime” sequences should culminate in a cathartic release from tension, as if the mind, after putting up resistance against the flow of incomprehensible space, after having tried to imbue it with meaning / decipher it, had decided to flow with it, to follow it where it lead, even into an unknown territory where the city, where lived space, ceases to make any conventional sense. Ideally, the viewer will be brought to the point where this release will be a desired thing, something that needs to happen in order to reconcile the insupportable tension between the space and the viewer’s mind. The final mime sequence would be, in sharp contrast to the visual/editing buildup of the previous sequences, longer (10-15 seconds) and would involve completely flat, very bright lighting and a passive posture on the part of the mime.

The mime will be shot against green screen. Ideally, I would like to create a background that resembles the “luminous cube”. The walls of the cube will be a different color in each sequence to match the color palette of the previous photographic sequence. As we progress in the piece, we will be able to see less and less of the cube, however (until the final sequence), as the lighting recedes from the background to focus more on the mime, and becomes more contrasty – as if the person were “losing space” and losing their footing in a black emptiness. The mime will be dressed in textureless, close-fitting black, their body gradually losing visibility with the change in lighting, until only their face can be used as the expressive element.

The soundtrack will be atonal and electronic, incorporating sound effects and feedback, in the style of noise artists or industrial electronic music artists such as John Cage, Throbbing Gristle and Venetian Snares. The music for the sequences involving the photography of infrastructure will progress to become more and more monotonous, to include less and less variation. The music for the sequences involving the mime will progress to become more varied, faster, and will start to incorporate harder and harder beats (perhaps even morphing into a drum n’ bass sort of sound). The final pairing of a photography / mime sequence will have both soundtracks merge again in a common soundtrack, a more melodious, more “beautiful” sound (something like the way the soundtrack I used in my exercise piece earlier this semester climaxes/dissolves into a more ecstatic, slow movement) to express the release or relief, the sense of liberation at the end of the short.

I’ve decided to use only one screen – although I am playing with the idea to have the final climactic sequences “explode” across multiple screens.

“Fears of Utopia”_ styleframes #3

March 9th, 2009 project updatesTags: city, infrastructure, photography

First go at photography and walking around my neighborhood with a little low-grade Kodak consumer camera. Fortuitously for this project, I live a few blocks away from the knot of freeways near Downtown – a lot of sprawling infrastructure. In terms of Photoshoping, I am still searching for the right look. Some pictures feel too busy…

“Fears of Utopia”: styleframes_2

March 5th, 2009 project updatesTags: city, noise, photopia, space

photographic sources (in order): Hans-Christian Schink, Cassio Vasconcelos, Osama Kaneimura

soundtrack source: Venetian Snares

Paroxysm_animation using found footage

February 27th, 2009 project updatesTags: animation, body, found footage, music, paroxysm

I used found footage of old aviation daredevil acts provided by Mike Patterson (USC John C. Hench Department of Animation and Digital Arts) for his experimental animation class to make this short. The film presents the human body as an instrument for the enactment of a transcendentalist fantasy that addresses both our desire to free subjectivity from ordinary (bodily) limitations and our fascination with the possibility of our own physical destruction.

Treatment: “FEARS OF UTOPIA”

February 20th, 2009 project updatesTags: city, noise, space, utopia

Style frames feature the work of photographer Cassio Vasconcelos  (depicting the uninhabited, alien feel of marginal urban landscapes, but also exploring the aesthetic pleasure of pure space), Rutt Blees Luxemberg, and breakcore/IDM music artist “Venetian Snares”.

This animated short explores the question of the ‘liveability’ and humanity of contemporary planned urban landscapes. The title is a play on the two meanings of utopia, as a place of designed perfection and function and as a ‘no-place’, a transient and indefinable place recalcitrant to human occupation.

The short presents segments of animated photography featuring spaces in the city whose ambiguous purpose or lack of identity evoke a sense of ‘psychological vertigo’, what I think of as a hypnotizing mixture of fascination and alienation. These spaces are tunnels, passageways, roadsides, bridges above freeways, abandoned buildings, unkempt infrastructure, closed strip-malls at night, streetlights, subway tracks (above ground), empty parking lots, apartment façades with closed/dark windows.

These spaces will alternate with live-action segments in which a person in a room ‘enacts’ the atmosphere, mood or “being” of the different places put on show, through the play of expression on their face or through gesture and bodily movement/posture. The actor will be as textureless and smooth as possible, preferably androgynous: thin, medium height, dressed in black pants and a long sleeve black T-shirt, bald, with large (‘frightened’) eyes. I want to keep my options open in terms of ‘the room’ that provides the environment for the actor. I want to shoot the actor with a green screen background that allows me to place the actor in a different room depending on the space he/she is enacting – this series of rooms will actually be one room that I get footage of and whose visual characteristics (brightness, hue, saturation, texture, patterns) I have modified to correspond to/evoke the visual characteristics of the urban space that the actor is enacting, hopefully strengthening for the viewer the bond between the urban landscapes/the actor. The framing/shot of the room will be the one invariant – three walls (the back wall a frontal surface, the left and right wall slightly longitudinal surfaces), all of equal or close to equal surface dimensions. However, in case the green screen option does not work out (technical difficulties, mistakes…) I also want to shoot the actor in a real room. The connection with the urban landscapes in this case will be emphasized by changes in the actor’s makeup/ facial paint (color, patterns). For example, if the space I have shown involves striking patterns of light and shadow, these patterns will be reproduced (in a stylized way) on the actor’s face, or if the space is drenched with a red light, the actor’s face will be painted red.

I would like to film the actor in two different kinds of light. The first scheme would involve a flat style of lighting, in which a bright, warm/orangish light evenly lights both the actor and the room. The second scheme would involve lighting the actor much more fully than the room, so that while the front of the actor is brightly lit, the back wall of the room, the far sides of the other walls and the corners are steeped in shadow. The actor’s choreography would then involve playing with this brightness gradient (stepping into the light, moving back into the shadows). I am unsure how to carry on the second lighting scheme in the green screen context i.e whether I need to shoot the screen as evenly and fully as the actor and then change the lighting with After Effects.

In terms of the actor’s choreography, I envision simple, ‘one-liner’ movements rather than complex ones. I want the actor’s physical movement to mirror the movement of feeling that occurs when one goes to/contemplates these different spaces – at this point I feel that dance-like movements would distract from the space imagery and introduce unnecessary signifiers. For example, if I show an empty office space with white walls and gray carpet, a corresponding choreography might involve the actor’s face distorting into a silent scream while he/she crouches down on the floor as if reacting to a bombing/air raid. An interesting option would be to modify all or some of the movements in post (speed up, slow down, reverse) to make them seem more inhuman, in order to emphasize the ‘unliveability’ and artificiality of the spaces shown. A lot can also be done to choreograph movements that express discomfort or un-naturaleness (arms bending the wrong way, a 3-part sequence of a-rhythmic movements)

celebrated mime Marcel Marceau using his body as a site of inarticulable tension

In terms of editing the urban space sequences, I want the spaces to come off as static (creating a ‘face to face with a blank wall’ sort of feeling), cryptic, even unapproachable. The experience I want to convey would ideally be similar to the experience described by Sartre in Nausea when he describes objects in the world, especially the nondescript, random elements one finds in urban landscapes as having “a type of small/petty meaning that taunts you with its indecipherability”. So far I’ve experimented with some options using scanned photographs: simple zooms and pans into/across the picture, in the mode of exploring the geometry and texture of the space (following the lines of structures with the camera), focusing on the ambiguous/incomprehensible space created by zooms and interspersing these extreme close-ups with flashes of the entire photograph to imitate the way one ‘takes in’ a scene and how one’s point of attention jumps from detail to detail and only occasionally embraces the whole picture. Other options that I would like to explore but haven’t really figured out include the question of whether to include some form of object movement in the animation of these spaces. The Dsrukt/Ronin piece was very useful in terms of thinking how movement can be more or less organically integrated into a still image – I can see the same sort of thing working in the case of a photograph of the band of grass and scruffy vegetation next to a highway, where everything would be still except for the leaves of a bush or grass moving in the wind. I can also imagine a form of animation that would imitate the staggering/non-fluid quality of (“bad”) stop-motion, where new elements keep appearing/disappearing in the photograph – for example, changing the color/brightness of the windows in a photograph of the façade of a building in order to create a surreal version of accelerated time. I’ve also thought of creating the illusion of moving objects simply through sound: for example, to create an atmosphere of damp coolness in a tunnel by slowly zooming into the tunnel while the sound of running, cavernous water grows louder and louder.

In terms of the soundtrack, I wish to establish a clear separation between the space sequences and the actor sequences. I see the actor sequences accompanied by nothing more than a droning sound, which simply varies in pitch depending on the sequence. Variety and complexity in the sound-scape is a property of the urban landscape. Theoretically, I am mostly interested in using atonal, dissonant sound mixed with sound effects, in the spirit of ‘noise music’ artists like John Cage and Throbbing Gristle, to create the atmosphere of discomfort I am looking for. I find that noise music creates a strange dual feeling both of detachment/alienation and of almost unwilling immersion or hypnotic engrossment in the viewer. However, I have experimented with editing certain sequences to still atonal and aggressive/distorted, but faster and less monotonous electronic music with some promising results. I find this kind of music introduces an element of the sublime/aesthetic pleasure that provides an interesting counterpoint to the dissonance/distress that it also embraces. The degree of abstraction in the music I end up using will depend on whether I ultimately feel that a sustained feeling of discomfort/alienation in the viewer becomes too monotonous, and whether I need to vary the range of emotional experiences for greater effect (touches of sublimity).

The question of whether to use a single screen or two screens is something I still have not settled upon. This depends I think on whether the correlation between the actor in the room and the urban landscape animation will be most clear and effective through single-screen editing (alternating one with the other, whether simply having a ‘space’ sequence followed by its ‘actor in room’ companion sequence or interweaving both in tighter, shorter edits) or by having one screen play the space sequences while another plays the ‘actor in room’ sequences. The effect of forcing the viewer to shift their attention erratically from one to the other could have either the effect of reinforcing the destabilizing effect I am after, or it could damagingly distract the viewer and inhibit the sense of hypnotic immersion I am also after. Perhaps a two-screen setup that could counteract this last effect would be to have the two screens placed at eye-level and leaning towards each other at a right angle, so that when the viewer steps into the triangular space created by the screens they find themselves ensconced in a sort of immersive head-space (where they don’t really need to move to shift their attention; their eyes just flicker from one screen to the other). According to this scenario the most effective sound set-up would perhaps involve headphones – the complex soundtrack for the ‘space’ sequences and the droning soundtrack for the ‘actor in room’ sequences would be separated in the right and left ear – such an installation could certainly be a step forward in terms of ‘kidnapping’ the viewer’s attention and putting them in a tight psychological spot, but it might also create a sense of aesthetic confusion or being too overwhelmed that would go against the goal of delivering a focused and precise/coherent experience.