other people's artwork

I feel like I ought to mark the imminent passing of the decade.

admin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:31:12 +0000

Here’s a list of my top ten albums of the decade. (I never claimed to be a mathematician.)

The Aislers Set – The Last Match (2000, Slumberland)
The Softies – Holiday In Rhode Island (2000, K Records)
Kings of Convenience – Quiet Is The New Loud (2001, Astralwerks)
Low – Things We Lost In The Fire (2001, Kranky)
Luna – Romantica (2002, Jetset)
Nagisa Ni Te – On The Love Beach (2002, Jagjaguwar)
Rachel’s – Systems/Layers (2003, Quarterstick)
Lali Puna – Faking The Books (2004, Morr Music)
Broadcast – Tender Buttons (2005, Warp Records)
Alva Noto + Ryuchi Sakamoto – Insen (2005, Raster-noton)
Jóhann Jóhannson IBM 1404, A Users Manual (2006, 4AD)
Scott Walker – The Drift (2006, 4AD)
Gravenhurst – The Western Lands (2007, Warp Records)

Why it took two years to make a four minute video

admin — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 15:15:00 +0000

When I was setting up a piece in Amsterdam in 2007, I had some time alone and happened to capture some footage of smoke rising. It was at a time where I was borrowing a video camera from someone, and didn’t quite know how to use it properly. The result was that the footage had problems with the autofocus, and randomly flickered into and out of focus throughout the clip’s duration. Of course, I didn’t notice this until I was back in the UK and reviewing my footage, so I thought that it was probably unusable and filed it.

After a bit of mulling, I decided that maybe the randomness of the focus was an interesting and important possible factor in the work, and decided to try and use it as a method of controlling the volume of a soundtrack that I would apply to the clip.

Where to start with that was a bit of a problem. I began trying to do it manually, marking the points where the blur seemed to increase and hoping that I could raise audio volumes at these points in a convincing way. As well as a mammoth undertaking, it didn’t seem like the most efficient use of my time. There had to be a way to automate this.

Luckily, the camera was cheap and as such the framing on the LCD screen was inaccurate when I was shooting the footage. This meant that I had a small corner of roof at the edge of frame which provided a suitably hard edge from which to gauge the quantity of change in focus. After a bit of tinkering with brightness, contrast and cropping, I had some workable footage. Now all I needed was a tool to do the job.

I had used Max/MSP+Jitter on previous occasions for live video processing work, and so I gave that a try initially with the cv.jit set of computer vision add-ons. I find Max/MSP the most complicated programming environment going, and I seem to have to relearn it almost from scratch each time I go back to it. As a result of this, I didn’t really make any headway at all with cv.jit and so again decided to shelve the project.

Returning to the footage maybe eight months later, I resolved to actually try and complete the piece by hook or by crook, and took a more methodical approach to problem-solving. By re-rendering the footage using all sorts of filters, crops, and other pieces of Final Cut trickery, I experimented with a whole load of possible ways to measure the level of blur over time. None were successful, until I decided to try and approach the task using my programming tool of choice, Processing.

I’d initially ruled out Processing because of the long-standing problems with the video library that made it a second choice environment for such work in earlier versions. I’d not used it for video sensing since the first version of Myron came out, which I’d left well alone due to instability and other problems with reliability and speed. However, the discovery of OpenCV suddenly made Processing a more viable environment for video sensing. As well as being reliable, it seemed incredibly fast and perfect for the task in hand.

The problem now was to deploy it in such a way that the change in focus could be measured and used to control the volume of a sound. Here’s how I did it.

Firstly, I referred to Golan Levin‘s excellent paper on computer vision techniques, which reminded me that the way to measure the difference in blur was not to try and assess the sharpness of a line, but to compare a whole frame with a previous frame. I initially tried comparing each frame to the frame previous to it, but eventually settled on a method where a non-blurred frame was selected manually, and each subesquent frame was measured against that to see how many pixels had changed in value. The higher the value, the more blur there must be.

This blur was measured using the absDiff() function in the OpenCV library, which in the screenshot above, measures the difference between the image top-left (the live video) with the image top-right (the reference frame), resulting in the image you see bottom right. For each frame, the number of non-black pixels was counted and that number represented the change in blur.

Making this value control the volume of a sound was the next step. There were a number of options available, and rather than invest more energy thrashing around trying to learn the Minim library for Processing, I decided to do something with a little more long-term usefulness, and send this value to Max/MSP to control the volume of a sound file. Why? Because to do so would mean mastering Open Sound Control (OSC), and by mastering that, the whole system can be used to transmit such information across a network rather than just between programs on the same computer. So, strategically, it made sense to do it this way. The OSC communication was handled by using the oscp5 library for Processing, and the udpreceive object in Max.

You’ll notice that I didn’t get Max to actually record the resulting sound levels to file. I reasoned that it would make more sense to record it using AudioHijack, simply because a cleaner sound would be produced if Max wasn’t also having to write the audio to file. The final problem with this was that even AudioHijack didn’t seem to write the file as smoothly as I would have wanted. While beginning the clip perfectly in sync, the sound gradually drifted out of synchronisation with the image when the two were edited together in Final Cut, despite being completely in-sync during the process of recording. After much hand-wringing, the solution I came up with to this was to record the sound via the output of the headphone socket to another computer, and then to edit that file together with the original moving image footage.

That seemed to do it. Finally.

If there’s anything to be learned from this, it’s perhaps that in my work, as with the work of many artists using technology, the actual production hours that are invested are often not made visible in the final piece of work. This video required the implementation and interrelation of a fairly complicated set of technologies in order to exist, and the labour, the craft perhaps, was in the programming and assemblage of the system through which the work could come into being. Unlike, say, a very detailed drawing, this labour is beneath the surface of the work itself, which often appears to be deceptively simple.

The final video will be online soon.

Print out

admin — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 19:01:46 +0000

I’ve spent a while today working on some prints. I bought a new digital camera a while ago, and this is the first time I’ve attempted to make a hard copy of any of the images I’ve taken with it. It’s extraordinarily exasperating to try and wrangle a good looking print out of Photoshop, it seems, but when it does finally behave, the results are really pleasing. By ‘pleasing’, I think I mean ‘visually seductive’, and although the images I’m playing with at the moment are tests, and are not for exhibition, it’s quite exciting to see the level of quality and to enjoy the possibility that image making might become a more central part of my practice.

The question is what artistic value I might choose to place on such images. I’m more accustomed to producing systems, or installations, or moving image works, or conceptual propositions. It feels peculiarly unsatisfactory to produce something that is nothing more than a still image, that pleases primarily on an aesthetic level. It is, however, a dissatisfaction that feels worthy of interrogation and that might develop into worthwhile new work.

Syllabi

admin — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:50:45 +0000

I’ve been writing syllabi today for a teaching/residency application I’m working on. Part of me hates it, because it’s the sort of task that never gets adequately completed in the annual flurry of activity that is the September before teaching. I associate it with number-crunching, room booking, equipment sourcing, and administrative woe. Today though, after seeing some examples from ‘proper’ academics and close friends, I got a glimpse of the way it used to be, the way it should be. Thinking about content, about student experience, about how and what to teach: these are the things that disappear when the heat is on and the pressure to complete the administrative side of organising a course takes over.

I wish I now had the time to follow through such a positive approach to the planning of teaching. The deadline for the application is in 48 hours. I hope that will be enough time to build in enough inspiration.

The Return of the Blog

admin — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:46:10 +0000

Recently, I’ve been thinking about why I stopped writing this blog and whether I’d like to continue it. I stopped, simply I think, because I ran out of time. I ran out of time to see shows because I was busy making them, and making them took time away from writing and reflecting.

I’m going to trial the renewal and revival of this repository, notwithstanding the fact that it never really got adequately tidied up when I moved it from Blogger to WordPress, and the layout and formatting are all wrong. I can forget these things, and just start writing again. If I let myself.

The Sheffield Pavilion 2007

admin — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 14:36:00 +0000

Here it is – the long awaited Sheffield Pavilion, printed out and ready to be distributed. The launch at the Venice Biennale is on Friday (Bar Margaret Duchamp, Campo Santa Margherita, Venice, Friday 8 June, from 8pm), and copies will also be distributed at Documenta in Kassel next week. I think copies will be on sale after that from the Cornerhouse Bookshop in Manchester, although I suspect Site in Sheffield will have a few too.

The HAG (Host Artists Group) project looks good, despite some over-eager cropping by the printers, and a slightly greenish cast to all the images. I guess you just have to take the rough with the smooth when the printing and layout are in someone else’s hands. The work and the project look good, and the overall document is an excellent way of putting Sheffield’s art scene on the international map.

Happens to the best of us

admin — Sat, 19 May 2007 13:45:00 +0000

I’ve had quite a lot on happening recently, and as such postings have been very few and far between. Notwithstanding apologies, I’d like to focus briefly on poor Anthony Gormley’s latest piece, unveiled last week at the Hayward Gallery in London. The cube of fog is an extremely interesting sculptural proposition, although not as interesting as a very similar piece by Ann Veronica Janssens, which was unveiled a decade ago in 1997.I’m not suggesting that anything naughty or plagiaristic has gone on here, more that the field of cultural production is so huge now, being populated by so many practitioners in widely differing cultural settings, that even the really big names end up producing work that is less unique than it first appears. That said, if I was a lawyer acting for Ms Janssens, I’d be keen to know what he was doing in June 1997 when Janssens’ piece was shown at the Venice Biennale.

An update, for your convenience

admin — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:20:00 +0000

I’ve been away for a while working on a project with Eddie Ladd, which was completed in February and premiered at the Linbury Studio, ROH2, Covent Garden. This came after a number of exciting equipment malfunctions, and the replacement of one piece of equipment less than 30 minutes before the opening night’s performance. Eddie seemed happy with the results and the show did get a positive review, so it can’t have been too bad.Since then, my critical faculties have turned to jelly, so no reviews even though I have been seeing quite a lot of art. I have been struggling to refamiliarise myself with my practice: I made a short new video piece for the MA fundraiser club night at the DQ Bar in a couple of weeks, and I’m developing new work for an exhibition in Amsterdam later in the year, but my main focus is on moving house and preparing to begin a new job at the moment. Brush up your CVs, Glamorgan will be advertising for a L/SL in New Media very soon.I’ve also begun the migration of the blog over to ‘new’ blogger, which means I have to completely rebuild my template. As a distraction from this drudgery, I’ve added my last.fm recently played list for your perusal, giving you a whole new way of judging me as a human.Finally, short word about Jon Warren, who passed away last week. We worked together on a number of projects during my time at Newport, including my first ever public exhibition at Tredegar House. We also shared a house for a couple of years during that time. Although we had fallen out of touch a little in recent years, he played an important role in that part of my life, and made an impact on my development as an artist and as a person. He will be greatly missed.More later, when the worst is over.

In London Again

admin — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 22:37:00 +0000

After a sleepy train journey from Cardiff, and a spectacular frosty walk in the sun across Hyde Park, I spent an enjoyable Saturday touring the galleries of London, beginning with Tate Modern’s new installation of Carsten Höller’s work. The installation consists of a number of umbilical structures which are actually artist-designed slides, offering a speedy descent from the very top of the turbine hall to the bottom in a small number of short, bumpy seconds. I had a go at the highest of these, and found it to be noisy, uncomfortable, slightly stressful and a little painful at the end. The acceleration was huge, and my flapping cheeks reminded me of movies of NASA test pilots as I was ejected into a mass of waiting spectators, with their cameras at the ready to capture my undignified disorientation.Others in the party took on the Level 4 slide, which was by all accounts the most severe of them all, with speeds reportedly reaching 35mph. This was quite a physical, elbow-bruising experience for many, but as I waited a the bottom for the participants to plummet out into stasis, I couldn’t help wondering where the art was in all this fun. There are many persuasive arguments for a participatory art of experience, and even I don’t think that art has to be serious all the time. That said, I think that there is a big difference between this and the work of, say, Rirkrit Tiravanija, which foregrounds the relations between participants. While I enjoyed the experience, I am still struggling to extract meaning from it.

From the Tate, via an excellent and very cheap lunch in a cafe behind Southwark tube, to White Cube to see Gabriel Oruzco’s latest. This graphite-drawn whale skeleton reminded me of sonar waves, but aside from the superlative quality of the hanging, left me cold. The paintings on the ground floor were constructed mathematically using the ‘knights move’ in Chess, and while interesting from a systems design perspective, had very little warmth and didn’t give me much to hang on to, despite the medieval resonances of the gold leaf and egg tempera. I couldn’t help thinking of John F Simon’s Every Icon, perhaps the superlative ‘combinations’ piece in existence. Nothing matches its utter brutality.

Interestingly, I had a wander around the back of the new White Cube building, and met a huge rat on my explorations. When peeking at the goods entrance, it was revealed that the heavy-looking stones that comprise the facade were actually made of rendered fibreboard.

We also visited Anish Kapoor‘s exhibition at the Lisson, and Runa Islam’s Conditional Probability at the Serpentine, but I am too tired to write about these properly except to say that neither really blew my socks off. Parts of the Anish Kapoor were interestingly visceral, but much of the work relies on distortions of the viewer’s image, a strategy that feels to me to be a bit tired and lacking in originality, regardless of how seductively it might be carried out.

Shanghai’d

admin — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 20:07:00 +0000

I arrived home today after a long meeting to discover an email that started like this:

Dear One Minute maker,Congratulations !!!!Your One Minute is in this exhibition!A selection of One Minutes videos from 12 different countriesshown in Shanghai BizArt Art Center China within the frameworkof Fringe festival.

Hooray, I thought, a show. Wait, Shanghai? That’s China, isn’t it. Fantastic! No, wait. Hmmm. Hang on. Precisely three days after I have added an irrepressible.info feed to this very blog, a competition has selected my work for an exhibition in a country with one of the worst human rights records in the world. This is, to say the least, the last thing I expected when I entered the piece into a Netherlands-based competition. The email continues:

The opening last Saturday 28th October 2006 was very wellattended.BizArt is an independent gallery/exhibition space.The Italian director of the gallery is Davide Quadrio.

It appears, then, if the opening was last week, that my work has already been shown, making me unable to withdraw the work. Great.A little googling reveals that Davide Quadrio and his Biz-Art enterprise have a strong base in Shanghai, and have collaborated with a large number of international institutions and agencies in the past, including the Mondriaan Foundation, which is where I suspect the link between them and the Netherlands competition comes from. A quote attributed to David in the Shanghai Star reads:

“Open culture doesn’t simply mean hosting some cultural activities.”

This sounds very noble, as does the information on the rest of the website describing Biz-Art’s support of young artists with residency schemes and exchanges. However, his quote in the Shanghai Star article continues

“In addition, culture should not have too close a connection to politics.”

The article goes on:

His thoughts were echoed by Gu who believed that the prerequisite for developing a culture was contrary to that of political development. A social base needed to be set up to provide the possibilities for free combination between different cultures.

I’m not certain that I agree with him or with the sentiment of the article. Art is always political at some level, as it will always reflect the climate within which it was made. An engaged art will always hold a political position, perhaps several positions simultaneously, empowering the reader or viewer to occupy these viewpoints in turn. I would perhaps agree more with the reverse of what David is saying: that politics should not have too close a connection with culture, ie that political control should not be exercised on artistic free speech.My disagreement is not with David (although I might question his decision to base himself in China), or with the artists or audience that might come to see the work in this exhibition. My disagreement is with the human rights policy of the government in the country where the work is being shown. Would my withholding the work create a positive change in that policy? I am unable at this stage to discern to what extent the Mondriaan Foundation or the oneminutes.org competition have engaged directly with Davide and Biz-Art to stage this exhibition or whether they had to deal with the Chinese government itself.I am left asking myself the simple question: is this ok? Or am I a sucker for buying into the pursuit of an international art profile, ignoring the potential ethical cost? By showing work there, am I supporting a repressive regime or helping to further free speech against that repression?