The .microsound community recently embarked on a new project to honor the life of writer David Foster Wallace, known widely for his intelligently sprawling novel Infinite Jest.

Instructions were to take one of the films attributed to the protagonist’s father and create a soundtrack. I was attracted to the surrealism in the description of Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators and almost immediately had an image of what the film would be like.

Not having read this novel yet, the source of my inspiration was the description itself:

“Baby Pictures Of Famous Dictators” – Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Documentary or uncredited cast w/ narrator P.A. Heaven; 16 mm; 45 minutes; black and white; sound. Children and adolescents play a nearly incomprehnsible nuclear strategy game with tennis equipment against a real or holographic (?) backdrop of sabotaged ATHSCME 1900 atmospheric displacement towers exploding and toppling during the New New England Chemical Emergency of Y.W. CELLULOID (UNRELEASED)

I took 45 minutes as my guiding point and imagined the film was a tableau, a “moving still life” of sorts. It’s a 45 minute long game, a slow motion still life of a disaster reflected in the childsplay of fooling around with physics.

We see a setting that never changes, of innocent children (we assume the same as in the pictures referenced by the title) against a backdrop that is ever changing, sharing an appetite for control. They become the embodiment of the Famous Dictators, playing games, like children, with adult toys of power and war.

A chemical emergency could imply this is related to nuclear power or physics. Are the children playing a game that caused the emergency? Are they blissfully unaware? Or are they working to solve the problem by a series of complex nuclear games? It’s unclear if we will ever know.

The soundtrack is not a reflection of the action seen onscreen, but rather the literal voice of each proper name. As their structures compost, weaving as they play the game, new forms are illuminated.

These nine names were used to drive various parameters specific to each person’s voice, guiding things like frequency, filters, delay effects and envelope (in each case, the longest, most familiar version of the English proper name was used):

• Adolf Hitler
• Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin
• Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini
• Mao Zedong
• Ho Chi Minh
• Francisco Franco Bahamonde
• Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
• Saddam Hussein
• Tojo Hideki

The analysis of the text file containing the names was done with perl, which wrote out various ChucK files. The entire piece is one large ChucK session recorded to a file, then normalized.

When I started the piece was a lot less “bright” than it ultimately became, but in a strange way I feel like it took on its own character, and mourns both the tragedy of these dictators and the loss of DFW.

The player on the project page is a great way to listen to the soundtracks everyone has done, and allows for direct downloads of the works.

Originally from Infinite Jest Project @ .microsound

A second highlight of the Zero1 festival was Fashionably Late For The Relationship a public performance by Lián Amaris Sifuentes, filmed by my friend Luke DuBois. It was presented in two formats, an installation on three screens, with footage being randomly pulled from the extensive footage archives, and an edited feature film version. I much preferred the film, perhaps because one of the major facets of the work is its relationship to time, and a theater setting invites this type of interaction better than a gallery setting.

From the site:

Fashionably Late For The Relationship is a three-day long public performance by Lián Amaris Sifuentes, filmed and digitally compressed into a feature-length video work by R. Luke DuBois. As a woman prepares for a night on the town, three days pass by in the city around her. In the live performance on the Southeast corner of Union Square, her slow, nuanced actions become a counterpoint to and critique of the unnaturally rapid and unyielding pace of the public environment which she redefines as the private, feminine ritual space of a boudoir. Her actions will be captured by a combination of three HD video cameras (wide, medium, and closeup) and a number of small surveillance cameras embedded in her set. The cameras will be shooting the entire time, with the result digitally time-compressed to a 72-minute multi-channel video installation. Accelerated to sixty-times speed in the final video, the barely perceptible acts of her intimate narrative unfold in a radically condensed time frame, making her actions the punctuation within the ephemeral blur of the transformed urban landscape. 

A trailer is also available at BitForms gallery.

Originally from Zero1 San Jose: Fashionably Late for the Relationship

Here is my post about speaking before the 2nd Blender Peach Open Source movie and slides:

document.write(‘‘);

Read this doc on Scribd: Blender Open Movie Premiere and Making Open Sustainable
Millions of pieces of CC-licensed content By bookishinnorthpark, http://flickr.com/photos/susan_w/1472641471/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0 By platinumblondelife, http://flickr.com/photos/platinumblondelife5/123381310/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 Share or Ton is Smart!

And the post:

If you haven’t been to Amsterdam or checked out what great work Paul Keller and CC Netherlands is doing, then I highly recommend you A.) get here when you can by jet, or B.) tap into their great projects on the net. In particular, I’m referring to the big premiere 2nd Annual Blender Peach Open Movie in Amsterdam last night. I had the great honor of speaking before the premiere which actually felt more like a warm-up gig — I took it on myself to get people pumped up for the film (laughing, chanting, etc). You can also see my slides here which debut a new style using the CC Sharing Creative Works Comics (which you may download now and translate, just as CC Netherlands has done and made availabe in a booklet here).

And finally, I spoke on a panel today called “Commons-based Peer Production” at the Economies of the Commons conference put on by CC Netherlands and others:

Strategies for Sustainable Access and Creative Reuse of Images and Sounds Online

International Working Conference
Amsterdam & Hilversum 10, 11 & 12 April 2008

This dossier documents and brings together background materials for the international conference Economies of the Commons. This public working conference and its side programs address the remarkable cultural, educational and societal significance of the new types of audiovisual commons resources that are currently being created on the internet. Sustainable public access and enhanced opportunities for creative reuse of these resources are the particular focus of this conference and this web dossier.

My panel and fellow panelists are described below:

described below:

After the lunch we continue with the second session about Commons-based Peer Production. How do new developments of creative reuse hold out against market-based production? With Felix Stalder (Open Flows), Jamie King (Steal This Film), Jon Phillips (Creative Commons) en Sebastian LÃŒtgert (oil21.org).

The panel came down to Ton Rosendaal from Blender Foundation describing his model for sustainability for Open film projects (something you will hear me describe in more depth coming soon) and Jamie King’s promise for creating a better voluntary donation system. I took the position as the realist on the panel to reel in the gradient between what commercial entities are presently doing to sustain content distribution (and production in some instances) with the approaches outlined to provide a path of realidad

Originally from Blender Open Source Movie Premiere and Panel on Economies of the Commons in Amsterdam

Last November the Department of Image Science at the Danube University Krems (Lower Austria) hosted the fourth installment of their TeleLecture Series. The event was entitled Remixing Cinema: Future and Past of Moving images and featured presentations by, and a discussion between media theorists Lev Manovich (pictured above) and Sean Cubitt. These lectures were recorded and the video from these proceedings was just archived online.

The writing of Lev Manovich is often referenced or at least invoked here on Serial Consign. He is a key voice in contemporary thinking about cinema and digital culture and in this talk he catalogs an “inventory of effects” of the widespread adoption of digital technology in the image arts in the mid 90s. The discussion draws connections between various facets of contemporary media production including: splash screens, broadcast graphics, photographic conventions, film title sequences and motion graphics. He weaves together observations on each of these paradigms to outline what he describes as a pervasive moving image aesthetic that is hybridized, remixable and transcends distinction between “commercial” and “avant garde”.

[jeremy blake / sodium fox / 2005]

Manovich’s talk is not only accessible and packed with insight but it also contains some choice eye candy and related commentary. Some of the projects discussed during the presentation are animated TBS station IDs, the visual effects of the film 300, a (very) close reading of the video for Common’s 2005 single Go (authored by mk12) and a nod of respect to the late American artist Jeremey Blake.

Check the lecture out for yourself, I’m looking forward to watching Sean Cubitt’s presentation sometime over the course of the weekend.

Originally from lev manovich on remixing cinema

I recently happened upon Zena Holloway’s exquisite work in photography. Shot underwater, Holloway’s work captures fugitive moments of fanciful visions, freeform in composition and suffused with mercurial light:

Holloway has also made several short films which give an animated grace to her still photography.

Originally from Submerged Visions