Video Art Experiment Results

At last I have some actual live moving footage of my video art experiments to show you. This piece is one of the set of pieces I've been working on using the Vietnamese Buddhist DVDs. That project has taken on some interesting forms as I've strived to effectively work with that particular set of unusual abundant material. I had hoped to keep the set pure, in that what i did with that material would stay confined to a cohesive body of work related onyl the the source material and no other external sources. But it harder to keep art in a cage than you think. So here is the first moving video i have to show you. The sound is made of cutups of various things, Finnish newscasts, Telugu oldies, etc. Enjoy!

Video Art Update 061813

I've been busy again on the video art front, now that I have a little more time to devote to artistic endeavours. The focus has been to some degree the reuse of VHS resources I've been encountering. For instance, some of the tapes I found in the Goodwill's ten-cent bin were religious in nature, long two-hour tapes of sermons, and on some pretty nice tape too. They make for a nice big canvas to work with, as some possible uses for the video art footage I'm creating will be for extended background play in various settings.

So here is a hpoto reel of some of the most recent sessions. What you're seeing is photos of the screen in action. Since the mix is laid down to VHS tape, and then digitized later, we don't get the benefit of live screenshots until the processing is done, so these will have to do!

Some of the scenes, even those they were made up of a lot of 'spiritual' source material, came out kind of evil looking in places.

New Video Art Experiments.

I recently came across a video mixer, and I've been busily working with it to create different kinds of video art experiments. in fact, I've been so busy doing them that I've not had time to report on them yet. here's a short report with some pictures of the setup and some of the results. Soon i'll have some of the results in a more digital, viewable form, but for now, here's what I've got to show you.

A Quick Hello, In the Midst of Much Activity

HI all, it's beena pretty busy past month and a half or so so I last updated this blog. This is largely because I'm crazy busy with the last part of design school. But there has been considerable activity here at Media Sashimi HQ, and soon I'll be making posts to document them. I've been getting my hands dirty in a lot of different creative forms, some visual, some audio, some digital, some meatspace. Check back here soon, and see what I've been up to!

Vinyl Experiments 03/13

Lately there have been a lot of the University of Oregon library's old 78's in the ten-cent bin at the Goodwill over by my house. There were a lot of language instruction records, some classical music, and some poetry and english lit records. I picked up a chunk of them to play with, and tried an experiment I used to play around with ten years ago or more.

The process involved placing a 10" record over a 12" record, and then a 7" record over that, all on the record spindle. What this does is force a lock groove onto the record that's playing, by virtue of it bumping up against the edge of the record just above the one that's playing.  I set up two turntables with a tower of vinyl as I described above, and played around back and forth with the loops the process created. There exists a recording of the session, but it will be part of a larger composition that's in progress.

What I did next was: I added into the mix one of the 30 second answering machine looping cassettes I have, and used it to record loops of the live mix to then add back into the mix. The way I had the mixer set up caused a feedback loop between the mixer and the tape, which was controllable by way of the EQ. The end result of all this got made into a video, which i posted on YouTube. And here it is:

Now I must backtrack, because before I did that experiment, I did a different one that involved exploiting a found lock groove on an acetate i found at the same Goodwill. The tracks on this disc didn't link up to each other, so at the end of each track there was created a lock groove. I let it run and added other similar elements on the other turntable for a live minimal dirt-groove dub. It's a little repetitive, but that's in the nature of the experiment. EQ was used to highlight and birng out the rhythm in the clicks and skips.. Here this one is:

 

The plan next, based on what I've learned is to start creating a number of videos of varying length, each using different modified junk vinyl or forced skips or tape loops, whatever. I want to make the videos as a set of 'compositional bricks' (-Goodiepal) and then assemble them into different webpage based configurations that allow the whole composition to be assembled at will by the viewer, while all the while letting YouTube do the heavy lifting or online storage. The same potential exists with Archive.org as a potential host, but I'll start with YouTube for this next spate of experiments.

Diggin Deep Pisces Birthday Special 030813

We rocked it again at the Astoria Bar on Friday for our birthdays. The 8th was midway between my birthday and Ian Lawless's and guest DJ Mr. Daddy's birthday was that weekend. So we joined forces and had a hell of a great time. James Meyer (Mr. Daddy) brought a lot of great funk and rare grooves we had heard he had, so it was especially nice to hear his selections. Here's the photo reel for the night:

Cuts & Edits "dusk rider"

I put together a video from images I've been working with lately to accompany a track I wanted to promote on YouTube. This is a track from last summer's prolific sessions, where I gave myself free reign to mix and match as much as I wanted in the pursuit of interesting trackmaking. The African and Latin edits mentioned in a previous post are part of that summer's sessions.

This track is the psych blues hip hop track that was one of my very favorites of the summer. It's gone by several different names, but in the interest of getting it up tonight, I gave it its new name, "Dusk Rider".