Moving on...

New, post-MA blog is up and running on my website. Check it out! Add it to your RSS feed. Contribute your thoughts or links that you think I'd be interested in. I would love it to be a place to continue creative, collaborative debate and idea sharing.

That's where I'll be posting from here on out.

Medialab Prado.

AVlab at Medialab Prado has been an amazing experience. I, too, feel the need to migrate my blog to a new one for my post-graduate art practice; so I will post a proper review of the experience on that when I return to London next week. A notice here will also be posted, but it will be embedded in my regular website

In the meantime, my post-MA performance life begins! at the wrap-up party for the lab. Will be fun to see what my work is like in a nightclub with typical set up of 1 projector, darkness and big (ish?) sound.

Here's the info in case any of you find yourselves in madrid:

October 1 / 11pm / @ Tempo Club
TRANS-AVLAB EXPRESS
AVLAB 1.0's last sonic stop. Live sound, experimental and audiovisual performances by artists of the workshop: Olaconmuchospeces aka Diego Javier Alberti / Sotaques (VJ Xorume + DJ/MC Gérson De Veras) / Servando Barreiro / Noish ~ aka Oskar / James Webb / Groundrush aka Simon Dell / Hans Christoph Steiner / Raúl Bri Díaz Pobrete / Tom Tlalim / Josecarlos Flores / Lena Schniewind / Jaime Lobato / Alberto Cerro / Roberto Moreno Maya / DJ Hidráulico.
@ Tempo Club (Duque de Osuna, 8. Plaza de España Metro Station). Free admission.

Everything, all at once now.

The next month is going to be insanely busy, but I'm looking forward to it. As I wrap up my MA, the first steps into the next phase have already fallen into place. And of course, are overlapping! I'm on a roll. Just a matter of keeping the momentum up through the next couple of weeks.

I did manage to do 2 runthroughs of my show yesterday, the last one with an audience member who hadn't seen my work before! Both runthroughs felt really solid and my audience member was interested in what was going on. I'm happy to have gotten the show to this point since I've got things that are future looking happening this coming week.

Here's a brief overview of what the end of August and beginning of September hold for me:

- do my final show at Wimbledon College of Art!
Will post my performance schedule here in a separate entry this weekend.

- fly to Vienna to interview Pamela Z
Lucy pointed me to her work early on in the course, I blogged about it here. Very excited to see her live and get a chance to talk with her about her work and the themes and common interests we might (or might not) share.

- Movement for Dorks at Burning Dork
I'm running a workshop with the dorkbots where I get to test out my strategies for getting tech-based artists out from behind their gear. This will be a prototype of workshops I'd like to lead in the future and I'm really curious to see how it goes! I think it'll be fun. The dorkbot crew have been an amazing community for me here in London. Don't think I've blogged about them here before. Will try and do an entry in the future when I have more time. Oh, and yes, to add to the ridiculousness: the camp is being held in DORKING. naturally. ;)

- AV Lab 1.0, Medialab Prado, Madrid
I will be heading to this workshop in Madrid for the last two weeks of September. Get to collaborate with a bunch of interesting sounding A/V artists from all over the world. Great opportunity to start finding a broader community doing similar work to me and also a great chance to finally get to Madrid!

OK, back to this weekend's activity: assembling/finalizing documentation!

21 August runthrough

Managed to do a full run through yesterday without crashing Isadora.

I spent the morning organizing some final bits of tech and writing my notes from Tuesday into an actual score sheet that I could reference during the run. The score has ended up being 6 sections with a reprise of the second one towards the end. I don't have the sheet with me here at home, so will have to wait to post it later.

The runthrough felt spotty but overall I think the score is going to work. Most of the sections run between 10-15 minutes, which is perfect timing for the 90 minutes I have allocated as "performance" times over the weekend. The run yesterday ran about 70 minutes including some hiccups.

Watching the video recordings of the performance continues to be really helpful for me to get perspective on what I'm doing. I will tend to fixate on the parts that weren't working and extrapolate that to the whole performance "not working". Reviewing video shows me that I was right about the parts that I thought weren't working, but also shows me all the parts that are working.

Plan for today: I'd really like to try and run through it TWICE. Will be exhausting but interesting.

Plan for weekend: Get documentation to at least 75% completion. I'm feeling the time crunch and know that this is the last serious chunk of time I have to concentrate on it while I'm locked out of rehearsal space for the bank holiday weekend.

Last week wrap up.

Finally got a chance to upload 2 more batches of videos from last week. The week ended with final tech setup and trying to work out what to do with two projectors. Having two dramatically changes the dynamic in the room, in a way that I like and want to work with.

Big thing that I noticed yesterday is that I feel there is now an even bigger "Stage" area to the room. I will be breaking that wall with my own movement, but I can't gauge how audiences will respond until I have an audience. The only thing I know from past experience is that most people respond to projectors by ducking out of the way of them or avoiding them altogether. This would cut off about half of the space once both projection areas are revealed and leave everyone squished into one corner. I'll probably end up being more explicit when I invite people to move as they wish around the space and tell them they can walk in front of the projector beams.

I haven't had many visitors to my space, so I'll do my best to anticipate and plan for it and then make adjustments once I have people in the space with me. That all said, time has not been wasted! The time alone(ish) in my space has allowed me to rehearse and rehearse and rehearse.
Which one needs to do as a performer! This week I have begun working up to a full run of the "performance" section of my work, which I have scheduled to be an hour and a half. So far I've made it to 40 minutes. The thing that seems to be ending the run throughs is that I crash the program! This only happens when I try to record something on a track that is already playing. An easy mistake, especially when you're in the throes of performing, but I hope that the continued rehearsals over the next 7 days *gulp* will smooth this out as I become more comfortable with the final structure of the show and the technology setup in its final configuration. And it'll happen during the shows. I have no doubt of that! I'll take it in stride. It's Isadora telling me that she's done with that performance. :)

So finally, the clips I uploaded yesterday are going to be the final video clips as the run throughs are getting too long to easily review, digitize and publish to the internet. I've got a bunch of other things I need to be pulling together for the final assessment outside of rehearsal time which take precedence over video clips. Will still update progress here on the blog though.

Here are some clips that contain my favorite pieces from the recent uploads. In both of them, I noticed that I interacted directly with the TVs that I have dotted around the space. I haven't been prone to do that much, thinking that they're mainly there for the audience to play with. But of course, I can use them too and really should do.



This second one starts off a little rough (with wacky iMovie jump cuts...), but I like how the video inspires the sound and how I was able to connect the recorded and live actions through echoing and complementary sound and movement.



Second half to above video:

Flipping, finalizing tech.

I have 3 new videos to upload to YouTube, but they take so long! Will try and post them soon.

Recap of what they illustrate from the last days work:

I've been fleshing out the 3 core phases of the score I developed. On Wednesday, while waiting for final approval of my tech setup, I started to think about how I might use the second projector. I ended up flipping the image horizontally and worked with reflections of simple movements. I think this works quite nicely. Not convinced that it will always be this way.

I then continued to practice building up sections using the three pieces in the score. I was happy with the progression that came out of it:
- simple movement with arm and feet captured on video
- sound sample of my feet stepping on the floor as base for sound, layered with residual sounds from the previous day's work
- live mirroring if movement on video, in front of the video screen, and then also moving through the space
- capture of a new video of my face in which I open my mouth really wide!
- this new video encouraging vocalization to complement it, live wandering around the space
- I then recorded a variation on the vocalization and looped that
- it didn't line up with the video track at all! This is fine by me.
- Then finally, live movement that related to either sound or visual cues, but couldn't possibly link to both since sound and video were asynchronous.

Videos to follow early next week. This post clearly more notes for me than a clear sharing for others!

Yesterday, we got our final tech allocation. I set up all 3 monitors for the first time and am happy with the way they mark the space in a subtle way. I don't think I've mentioned this before, but I see the TV monitors as my "audience" in a very traditional way. They are all placed on chairs and are watching the events unfold in the passive way that an audience often does, and that a TV has no choice but to do. A friend visiting from the USA came by the studio and I was pleased to see him looking at the performance live, in relation to the video projection, AND through the 3 monitors. It reminded me of a goal I had for my audience: even though they are being filmed from different angles, I want the overall feeling to be one where they are free to move around and experience the performance in a way that is comfortable to them. I don't want to give them a prescription for how they can interact with the work (aside from obviously keeping them from wrecking the equipment.)

Jera also stopped in briefly and helped me make a simple statement. She said that video work is so often about the image, and I said that my performance was about foregrounding the body that created the image.

And today: wrestling with a signal splitter to see if I can get the two projectors running off my computer. and hopefully enough time to do another runthrough.

Settling the score, part 1.

Lots of videos posted to YouTube, only highlighting some here.

Ambient sounds and images when you're the only one in the room turned out to be quite fun. The door to my studio space has a sweet little jingle bell to it when it shuts, so I started walking in and out of the room and recorded the sound. I built up a soundtrack from this, often leaving the previous track running so that it bled into the next track and created quite a nice muddle as the tracks were layered further and further. The video ended up being signature "lena" I think. I am able to get 3 layers (2 recorded, 1 live) of me walking in and out of the door with decent quality when you are actually in the space. The poor quality of web based video means that you probably won't be able to make out the second recorded layer.

Here's a video clip from today which I think shows a good cross section of process and how it might all fit together. It's quite slow, but the camera was right next to one of the speakers, so the sound is fairly decent.



From watching these, I know that I need to spend more time repeating the action and figure out other ways or positions from which to watch the piece of video I have just created. Too much hovering near the laptop!

Interstitials and sound clips.

I created some interesting compositions while accidentally overlapping videos. I thought they might work nicely as stand alone loops which can play when I need a break or am not in the space. Something like that.

The first clip was created last week on a day when I had given my keys to my brother for the day and couldn't get to any cameras! I learned how to export directly from Isadora, which is a useful thing if I decide to use these interstitials.





I also learned that I can record audio in quicktime but I don't seem to be able to play them except in my iTunes. So! Hopefully I will sort this out soon and post them here.

A Score to Settle

Last week ended with me having a clearer idea of a skeleton score to work from. After my experiments, I came up with a progression that I am fleshing out this week. There are 3 sections to it. Here are the notes from last week. Following entries will go into more detail about how this has been manifesting itself in subsequent rehearsals.

1) ambient sounds and images - capturing natural sounds (people talking, feet shuffling) and observational video (people walking around the room from a wide angle, possibly close ups as well)

2) sounds from a body part (snap, clap, percussive mouth noise) video of the same part then shadow play on the projection with the same body part

3) more distinct singing harmonies, shadow play into projections onto skin, use of palindrome movement in the video, free movement and harmonizing live in the space

Website updated.

Oh! And my new home page is up and running!
The whole site should be up next week.

yesterday, today, tomorrow

This week is about running performance modes to determine elements for a score that I can work from over the coming weeks and probably into the performance itself.

yesterday was experimenting with types of projections onto my body to see which ones might work easily and effectively in an improvised performance. clips of interesting ones here. This clip is also scattered with another random echoing which I can get to 3 layers (2 video and 1 live) when it's dark and stormy outside! otherwise it's too bright in the studio.



Today I'm going to try and run at least a 1 hour long performance.

Tomorrow I will be adding a second projector and third monitor.

I like to watch.

Short clip from yesterday's rehearsal. Contentwise it doesn't look much different from other stuff I've been doing, but some important revelations or points of clarification came out of yesterday's rehearsal.



At the moment, I am my audience. I'm setting up a space where I can watch people and build a composition out of their sounds and movements. Judging from the feedback I've received so far, this isn't totally alienating my whole audience, but more to this point about me being my own audience: I've created a structure that I'm fascinated with. This is a step that I think all performers must go through at some point and I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing to be your own audience. Why on earth would you be creating something that you weren't interested in? The danger is when there is little or nothing for other people to get from it. I must be doubly vigilant about this because of my past as a camera person. I love observing people and recording what I observe so that other people can see what I see. So it seems only natural to me that I've created a performance space where I can observe and react to what I've observed. I like to watch. I think most people do, and I seem to be trying to create a setup where I can continue to watch; and I hope it is also a space where a good chunk of my audience is also enjoying watching and walks away satisfied with their experience. I know I can't please everyone. Perhaps I also need to be careful of this assumption and try harder to please more people. Interesting challenge....

Getting bogged down into thoughts, need to jot down some other notes and get on with the practical stuff:
- explore projection onto body parts. requires some intentionality. How to do this on the fly? Try some different strategies.
- workshop vs open studio vs performance: what would a workshop with audience members look like? what are people's expectations of coming to an open studio vs a workshop? What would I do with people in an open studio vs. workshop?
- establish the level of "road map" that I'm going to give me audience. What needs to be communicated to an audience to give them enough structure to get something out of the performance but still allow them freedom to approach the performance on their own terms (or at least feel that they have)?

Time alone in the studio is when I work on becoming comfortable with the setup I have and working out technological issues. I can't really figure out the issues related to my audience without them in the space. I hope people come to the Tues-Thurs afternoon sessions.

Anna Parkina performance.

I went to the Wilkinson Gallery last night to see an intermedia performance by artists Anna Parkina. Need to check out what other people are doing in my interdiscipline.

At any rate, I wasn't in love with the performance, but it was worthwhile to put a couple of things in perspective about my own practice.

The performance involved a video projection, a cello player, some ambient crowd/commuter train sound, and Parkina doing what can only be described as "interpretive dance" in the most gaudy and stereotypical sense. (please note that I'm not saying this to be catty, judging from the playfulness of her other work that I glimpsed, she'd probably agree.) The video was a mirror image of itself where figures would pop out of the seem between the two images and make an interesting shape. There were times when either her live body or her shadow (or both) were beautifully complementing the form that the recorded mirror bodies were creating. I felt that could have been the whole piece right there.

I saw in her performance, that while she clearly has done work in video before, she's still struggling with the big challenge of working across disciplines: you get kinda overwhelmed with all the cool stuff that's at your fingertips and it's really really hard to edit it down into a cohesive whole. And even when you think you have, it's still too much.

The question this raises, which I think I'm trying to address is: Is it interesting to watch the chaos of too many parts not working together for those rare glimpses when it does come together? I clearly think that the answer is yes for my own work, but am I that patient with other people's work? Mmmmm. not really.

This is really telling! I'm glad that I'm proud of my work and want to embrace the quirks and uncomfortable moments and I do love work that takes the quiet little pops and fizzles that are all around us and make something beautiful out of it. I guess maybe the difference is that I don't always feel that's what other artists are trying to do with their work, that they are trying to present a polished piece when they haven't yet harnessed all the nuances of the different media they're trying to throw together into one piece. It's really a tall order. Maybe I'd like it better if I thought it was really trying to embrace the chaos?

The performance also confirmed for me that it's important that people that come to my show are able to come and go as they please. I felt soooo trapped at this performance last night and I wanted to act out, which is very unlike me. I think it's because I'm so close to this type of work right now with the final show only a month away. I don't care that not everyone wants to stick around my work for a long time, I certainly stay with some pieces longer than others. However, I've also had people note both during my scratch performances and the Nunnery show that they wanted to sit with the piece for a while. I'm happy to have people come to my work on their own terms and not put a finite time limit on something that seems to want to continue to evolve longer than a 20-45 minutes time slot.

Notes on scratch 2.

A little belatedly, here are my thoughts on Scratch Performance 2.Having trouble uploading videos to YouTube. I've managed to get 3 of the 4 up there!


Click here to view the videos. I've included small descriptions of what's happening in each section. Feel free to comment here or there if you have questions.

So recapping the performance:
- the call and response strategy worked well once I got the technological glitches sorted out.
- the technology setup continues to be good. I really like how the space changes depending on what is happening. For example, people were quite free with their movements around the space until the projector turned on. That shifted things completely.
- My sense from the audience is that I am tapping in better to the vibe in the room. They'd mostly gotten over the novelty of goofing off for the cameras on the televisions and were ready to sit back and watch when I started singing and recording video.
- I think I like to move away from the hypertheatrical screaming mouth.
- It seems like the little explanation, with some work, is a helpful point of entry for audience members into the performance.


What next:
The big thing: I realize I can't develop this in a solitary vacuum. I'll be sending out an invitation to MA students and other artists around London to come visit me in the studio Mon-Thurs afternoons throughout August. I plan to have a more casual, open studio approach to Mon-Wed and then push it over into more traditional "performance mode" on Thursdays. I think this model will continue to allow me to have some alone time to flesh out ideas and work on technology issues, and continue to help me figure out the right pitch and how I interact with visitors.

What needs work:
- play with having 4 monitors so that there is full coverage of the room
- I would like to try having the monitors play back pre-recorded material at times too. My idea at the moment is for that to be edited pieces from previous days' performances
- sort out the sound. I'm not quite sure how to get the immersive sound system going and how that will get hooked into the Isadora setup on my computer. Tech consultation is imminent.
- continue to experiment with different shifts in tone and how audience members shift their activity in the space
- try adding another projector (figure out how to control it from same computer) is it also capturing video or is it playing back pre-recorded stuff? Interesting prospect of expanding temporal dimension back into the less recent past in the space.
- I'm going to experiment with inviting people to stay after the performance and do more of a hands on "workshop" with them. I have a feeling this will be met with resistance, but might be another natural and nice extension of the performer/audience dynamic

Hm. there's probably more to be added, but I feel a more pressing need to get SOMETHING about Scratch 2 up on the blog!

Low tech saves high tech.

today was that day when you feel like things are going really well and you are then fed a huge lump of humble pie. As your computer keeps crashing. over. and over. and over.

I figured it all out, and as much as I say I'm about exposing my process here, I doubt that you really want to hear me discussing the maddening nature of debugging sound and video capture optimization in Isadora. However, if you're geek like that and would like to know my beginner's woes, please leave a comment and I will happily go into more details.

As it is, I will say that the solution became apparent when I got home. And it involved masking tape.

See many of you for the scratch tomorrow.

Notes on scratch 1.

Overall I was really happy with how last week went. I think that the scratch performance went off very closely to how I had imagined it would and that I now have a good foundation on which to build the final performance. Things will be tweaked and tested from here, but at this point I don't feel like I need to throw any of it away. In fact, I want to be systematic about this and keep what I have until I am certain that I've tested its possibilities and decided it shouldn't be there.

Things I was happy with:

• the space. Primarily, I love the acoustics in the space and the sound of the kids playing at the school next door. I also just felt really focused and able to work in there.
  
• the setup. I think will stick with the technology setup. It gave me alot to work with without being overwhelming.
• the foundation setup in Isadora. It did exactly what I wanted it to do.
• interacting with the video projection. I think the projection gave both me and the audience a point of entry into the performance, but didn't completely submerge the other things going on in the space once the performance had been running for a couple of minutes.
• inviting the audience to get up and move around during the performance. I've been struggling with how much to guide an audience since the Nunnery. I was really resistant to giving any instructions on how to approach my work relying on people's natural sense of curiosity to kick in. However, research in the last couple of weeks has highlighted for me that people will look for clues on how to interact with the space/performance they find themselves in and that the placement of equipment and other people in the room are the biggest factors in determining how members of an audience will position themselves. To combat this, I need to speak up and invite them to move around. The people who did were glad they did. I was also glad that I had told them because everyone determined where they were going to position themselves based on who was already there.
• placing my rig and myself in the center of the space. This may have seemed subtle to most, if not everyone there on Friday, but it's critical to my practice right now. In most situations where an artist is manipulation video, they are BEHIND the audience, almost completely hidden, or shoved to one side so that people have a clear view of the screen. My body, however passively hunched over my computer is right there in the middle.
• projecting straight onto a wall in a lit space. Related to the point above. While still a focal point of the performance, I think this projection strategy breaks the absolute authority of the projected image. Going to review discussion from Friday and post some elaboration on this.

Things to work on/Next steps:

• Call and response with projection. The performance started to take on a narrative for me based on the pre-recorded tape. I originally envisioned this dynamic to be more of a call and response: video plays, I react vocally to what is being projected, I create movement or a new projection based on the sound, modify the sound in response to the new video and so on.
• Triggering the scream. Doug mentioned that there are different ways to trigger events with Isadora, such as having it react to a certain pitch. This seems really interesting to me. Would like to experiment with this and see what happens.
• Do I keep the scream at all? It was fun to do in scratch 1. Is its purpose going to fade if/when the performance gets longer?
• What is the right balance between naturalistic and hypertheatricality? I think this was an underlying thread to the whole discussion on Friday. I'm going to keep the singing, which is already an unnatural/theatrical mode of expression, so why or why not continue to push the performance along that naturalistic/theatrical spectrum?
• Find a good reason to keep the monitors. My gut is telling me they need to stay, but they were the weakest link in the performance on Friday. Just need to push their use more to find the answer to this.
• Spend more time moving around the space. Positive response to the moment when I got up and starting walking and singing in the space. It's an interesting moment for me too to "break free" from my tethering to the computer and projected image.
• If I do spend more time up and about, do I also build in triggers that might respond to something I'm doing that can happen when I'm not at the computer?
• Make the performance longer. 10 minutes isn't enough time! I knew this. Was a good test. Time to try different lengths. 15, 20, 30 minutes? 1 hour? 2 hours? Hm...

What to focus on for Thursday?
I think I will try to focus on the call and response method of building the performance and see if I can work out a more 'random' trigger for the scream so that it takes me by surprise when it happens. 15-20 minute duration.

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.

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.

When the mundane turns cinematic

I am struggling through a backlog of entries due to illness. And while I was pulling together slightly more involved entries, I found this piece of footage that I shot a few weeks ago for whatever reason and it interested me to post about it here.

A comment that keeps coming up is an interest in playing with scale between live and projected image. This ties in with the idea of telematic vs cinematic which comes up in just about every conversation I have with Doug.

Another thing that I want to play with over the coming week, and for the scratch (next week!) is my interest in the awkward or really mundane moments.

Therefore, the question that popped into my head is when I saw this was:
What happens when you turn a mundane action into something cinematic?

And the question I pose to all of you is:
What's going on in this clip?
I'm curious what difference it makes having sound on and off?