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?