Hard on the heels of "Digital Political Time Lapse," a second Aron Namenwirth-curated event is coming up Oct. 14--an evening of videos and performance at Galapagos in Brooklyn titled "Abstract Horror." Spent some time this weekend thinking about/working on my 15 minute performance. The current plan is to DJ several of my tunes from the laptop, while an accompanying DVD of looping animated GIFs (converted to video) pulses on a projector in stately, hypnotic, obnoxious fashion. Much potential material has appeared on my hard drive since my last event so I'm in the process of culling that--right now I'm figuring thirteen GIFs at about a minute per, edited so each is broken into shorter segments playing at unpredictable intervals. Some of these look dramatic blown up to 740 x 480. Trying to pick songs and images that will read clearly and work reasonably well on any gear or sound system. But I've never "played" at Galapagos before so I don't know how this will look/sound. Feeling much better about this project than I did a week ago.
general
sketch_a7 notes
A few notes on the previous "sketch"--not really a sketch, more of a finished "internet painting." A photo of a Technics turntable platter-edge is "sampled" and repeated in MSPaint to make an allover pattern. I didn't want to use Photoshop--it was important to struggle with it so it had a rough, patched together quality. There is a lot of extraneous cutting and pasting and blending at the pixel level so the metallic surface would become more organic, like tree bark or reptile skin or something. The "foreground" imagery is two HTML pieces by Chris Ashley that were damaged by being reproduced incorrectly in the Bloglines RSS reader. The red triangle pattern reads like a monogram on a shirt front and could be frames of a breaking or mending heart, depending on whether you read it from top or bottom. The blue pattern was copied, stretched, and pasted several times to make columns in a vague counter-rhythm to the turntable texture.
Digital Political Time Lapse Reception
Last night attended the mid-show opening party for Digital Political Time Lapse at LIU in Brooklyn, curated by Aron Namenwirth. The glass walled gallery in the LIU Humanities bldg is striking, kind of a Farnsworth House for art with folding tables for all the gear. It's an ideal space for video pieces, which the show mostly consisted of. I especially liked William Stone's Brion Gysin-like video cut up of a Bush State of the Union speech--from 2003, I think, the height of Dear Leader's inflated arrogance. The video mostly consists of him saying plural nouns cut from the speech ("terrorists," "families," "minorities"...), which emphasizes his penchant for loud sibilants. Later, the cuts became just the "SSS"s at the ends of the words so he seemed to be hissing like a snake with that same smug look on his face. While the sycophants all around him applauded. Man, four years and a complete loss of credibility later and the sycophants are still being sycophantic. I guess when something gets to be a habit...
Photos of the exhibit (and opening) are on Namenwirth's blog.
Update: The exhibit has been extended to Oct. 31.