Friday 4 July 2008

Videos of scratch performance 1

Posting these here. Interested in any comments you might have. Will post my thoughts afterwards/what next? type stuff over the weekend. Overall, I'm happy with the way this went off, of course realizing that there's alot to play with still. But this clarified alot for me.

Tech notes for the curious:
The technical spine of this performance is Isadora to record my voice on the fly (thanks Doug for figuring out how to do this!) and play back so that I could layer in real time. Video was also being projected from Isadora and I created a couple of scenes to shift between modes. The first transition, I triggered with the space bar, the second one was an automated scene shift using the pulse generator. The televisions had a live feed playing back on them from the camera placed on top of each one. That's the video that you are seeing below here. I recommend watching the two videos in the order they're placed here. It was the way that the audience approached the piece.



Thursday 3 July 2008

backblog - MA Open Studios

After a week of illness and trips to the hospital, I was not as far along as i had hoped for the MA Open Studios on 20 June. However, I decided to once again just go after a very simple, and specific thing: I wanted to test out what it was like to adopt an "open studio" tone to my performance. I again played with reflections, only this time, I set up a monitor in the studio space opposite me and trained it, live, on myself working on my computer. In the end, people did what they do when they see themselves on camera: react to that (fix hair, make faces, etc.) Then most of them noticed me smiling at them "behind them" or on screen and would come over for a chat. I loved this because it meant that people were coming to me on their own terms and interacting with the camera and monitor in completely honest ways without me telling them what to do. I also let them sit down and see what I was seeing from my computer. My idea to adopt an "open studio" "performance" tone for the final show? A KEEPER!

Here's a LAYERIZED excert of some of the footage. I compiled this on the night of the show. And am constantly amazed at how neat simple transparency can be. I really like some of the chance compositions that happened here.

backblog - Group staring contest

Testing: Reflections

What happens when a group of people is confronted with several monitors and a live person staying at them? or the monitors watching them? This was testing out a very tiny idea which had subsequently morphed in more interesting ways. Most interesting thing about this time with the group was watching how the group was influenced in their movement around the space by:

- the technology
- the other people in the group
- me

It's quite startling.