Vector Pitch & Proposal

Here is a link to my pitch for semester a project - Vector. An interactive Audio responsive Installation.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1dzBV_d43Rd97EzLduStn9KzxGzb_ToqLQKlaO2ZoGzk/edit?usp=sharing

Proposal

MED3004M Proposal Form - Digital Media

Name(s): Chris Pilkington

Date:  02/10/14    

Tutor(s):  James Field

Working title: Vector

What is the intended idea/concept of the project?

The intended idea of the project is to create an audio-responsive interactive installation exploring the vectorial class academic theory. This is a socio-economic theory that analyses the way industry has evolved since the dawn of the digital network. Industry used to be confined to a factory, a town or even a country but now digital networking allows creatine to breach these spatio-temporal boundaries and industry becomes more globalised and instantaneous. I shall apply this theory in the question of how the vectoral class is affecting the media, with particular focus on the music industry, and if in breaching these boundaries do we have a more democratic creation environment or whether we are cheapening art and culture?

Describe the intended audience:

 The installation will be of an experimental ilk and therefore potentially could have a wide audience demographic, however due to the material involved i expect the project to appeal to mainly educated, intellectual and critical thinkers. These people will be aware of popular media and communications theory as well as have a strong grasp of the current socio-economical and political environment as Vector will challenge and address these areas of thought.

  

How will this project extend your creative and technical skills?

 I plan to experiment with a combination of Analog and Digital media, these will include developing my skills in compositing and animation, projection mapping and potentially even coding with an Arduino. Creatively, I wish to experiment with audio and use it to embellish animation and light designs that are being projected simultaneously. 

Outline how the practical work will be carried out and the time-scales involved for each task. (If working in a group,  please also indicate the division of labour):

 Once i secure access to all the relevant components the majority of the time will be used developing, designing and compositing the animation. I shall also have to devote a proportionate amount of time in learning the Arduino code and using the audio interfaces.

A rough timescale could be as follows;

6-7 weeks compositing

2-3 weeks coding

1 week final assembly and mapping

What other work (by animators, designers, film-makers, writers, digital media producers, etc.) is relevant to your project? (This work may either be relevant for its conceptual, inspirational or technical similarity):

 Jonas Odell - Designer & Animator

Marcel Duchamp (Amongst Other Dadaists) - Artist

EXPLORINGAUDIO - Musician & Experimentalist

Allessandro Cortini - Musician

Busby Berkeley - Director & Choreographer

Len Lye - Experimental Filmmaker

List at least two critical texts that are relevant to your conceptual intentions:

 Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

McKenzie Wark - The Vectoral Class and its Antipodes

Karl Marx - Grundrisse

Any other information not covered previously:

 I shall also be studying the post-fordist approach to enhance my inspiration for the designs of the animations.

I shall use the audio techniques and research of the Berlin School of Electronic Music to inspire the sonic element of the installation

The audio genre shall also be inspired by the Bristol Trip Hop Scene, a la DJ Shadow, Portishead & Massive Attack

The project will attempt to illustrate, exemplify and demonstrate how the vectorial class theory can be applied to practical media production. It will be an immersive atmosphere that is different for every user, due to their experimenting with sound and the tape desk live as the performance loops. The Twitter visualisation of a heart rate monitor that spikes every time a selected keyword is tweeted (eg. #vector) is to show how a news story isn't alive unless its being tweeted about. This is a demonstration of how digital networks have breached the confines of the conventional newsroom broadcast or even tabloid or broadsheet press. The installation will be fast and dynamic to illustrate how the utilisation of said networks allow the contemporary socioeconomic to thrive at a much higher speed.

I will address three main media ideas in the piece as I apply Wark’s theory. Twitter as the new Newsroom, The degradation or embellishment on the audio industry due to increasing amounts of prosumer equipment and new distribution methods (Soundcloud, Youtube etc) And finally the artistic impression of the age of the machine. Dadaist and Constructivist ideologies shall be implemented to showcase the mekonos and how analog machines have been breached in wake of the digital revolution. This will be a recurring theme in my inspiration and development of the composited animations part of the projection mapped element of the installation.

The Tape deck will allow the users to experiment with the audio, by changing pitch and speed, fading in and out of tracks and banks of noise as well as general panning and equalisation controls. I shall be distressing some of the tapes in a similar way to how Len Lye distressed film in his Colour Box piece, but I may also encourage the users to distress the tapes in their own way.

Some examples of the types of visual inspiration are as follows; 

Jonas Odell - http://www.nexusproductions.com/work/take-me-out

Marcel Duchamp - http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-the-bride-stripped-bare-by-her-bachelors-even-the-large-glass-t02011

Len Lye - A Colour Box - http://vimeo.com/53129725 

Audio Inspiration  

Exploring Audio - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxi7RwFSKEg 

Massive Attack - Mezzanine - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpD-yf_vHYA

Evaluation of Final Product

Overall I was very pleased with the results of Winston 2.0 despite a few setbacks towards the end of the project. I believe i worked effectively at a consistent, efficient level throughout the duration of the project accepting changes and set backs well and adapting quickly to resolve issues without losing sight of the brief.

I believe Winston 2.0 developed into a successful and coherent solution to the brief despite unfortunately losing the interactive nature that i had initially planned for. I was let down by inexperience and lack of knowledge of the Quartz Composer software as well as the limitations of the MadMapper mapping software. I didnt realise until later on in the project that Quartz Composer doesnt support .mov files or any moving image format on its sprite levels which meant that I couldnt use it to convert the data from Ableton Live and send it to Madmapper. To get round this major problem I decided to create a looping video of the animations that i could animate to music, Maximalist by Baths.

This Loop could be used as a kind of idle splashscreen to the interactive display, playing through whilst no interaction was taking place. Or it could be seen as a demonstration of a possible interactive piece. I'm happy with the result of the loop despite the fact that it wasnt my intentional product.

Here is a link to the full loop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7iE_iEXn5g

Pure-Chaste-Productive Loop

During my research into sci-fi texts such as 1984 and the Kurt Wimmer film Equilibrium I discovered a coherent theme of propaganda being used to force abstinence and celibacy. In 1984 the youth of Oceania are encouraged to join the Junior Anti-Sex League. The ASL preaches promises of Purity through Chastity and encourage the adoption of Artsem (Artificial Insemination in Newspeak) as a way of reproducing.

In Equilibrium, citizens are often convicted of 'Sense Offences' including lust and passion towards the opposite sex. These offences are usually punished by incineration. Both texts employ chastity as a way of extinguishing the sex drive and destroying the traditional family unit - as this is seen to be deviations to the ideological causes of both institutions in Equilibrium and 1984.

I too decided to adopt this sense of forced chastity in one of my loops. I wanted to portray the dictatorship that technology has over our lives and by using similar propaganda I could draw similarities to the forces in Equilibrium and in 1984. I wanted to further this intertextual referencing by bringing in other recognisable imagery of oppressive regimes in modern society. I selected the Soviet Russian Union and East German Communists. I decide to incorporate Communist typefaces, namely the Kremlin font. I chose the bold and stark colour palettes of strong reds and crisp whites, to resemble the colours of the Russian flag. The character design was inspired by West German graffiti on the Berlin Wall opposing the East German regime. I liked the simplicity of the design of the male, I emulated this using the pen tool and duplicated it to create a 'female' by adding a gradual fade of hair and slightly lighter hue.  Using simple animation techniques, such as position keyframing and scaling, I created a scene with objects that I had created in Photoshop.

The message behind my animation was twofold, I wanted to highlight how human interaction with social networking through ever accessible mediums such as smartphones and tablet devices is creating data. Big data that can be commodified and in this way we are producing for a regime of Intelligence, advertising and security services use these data packages to commodify us also. The secondary message of my loop was to highlight the role of technology in a oppressive regime against us as citizens. I feel I have achieved this through the inter textual references that I previously mentioned.

GOD IS CODE Loop

The latest loop I have created was the Nietzsche-inspired God is Code short.

Nietzche coined the controversial phrase in his 'Parable of a Madman' poem/writing. He was writing about the decline of modern society and the birth of the postmodern age. here is the extract.

'Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.'

Nietzche isn't just referring to a divinity. He is saying that all the grand narratives of society were crumbling, eroding and changing. Society was becoming secular, losing faith and ignoring the 'gods.' Science can't give us all the answers, religion and politics definitely cannot, so to Nietzsche. God Is Dead.

But now, I challenge that God isn't dead, God is present but in a different form. In today's society there is an omnipotent being. something that creates and kills, something that controls us; from our bank accounts to our global security. God isn't dead, now God is Code.

The loop is very simple in construction - here is a basic storyboard that I started out by creating.

My initial plan was to have some very large, bold lettering on a plain background. I would then distort these and make it look like a corrupt file, citing reference from glitch artists such as Curt Clonginger and Rosa Menkman . This distortion would them be replaced by the secondary phrase 'God Is Code' 

The basic idea of the loop was to reference the way technology is being used to replace much of modern day society, not only is Nietzsche replacing God as deceased, now technology is replacing Nietzsche's notion. As now, In Code We Trust.

To create the glitch effect I duplicated the text layer in photoshop twice. I then colour overlaid the layers into a green and pink layer, I used the eyedropper tool to use the same colours as similar glitch art examples and then aligned them to be slightly differently on the horizontal plane. I did the same for the Code layer. 

Next I removed and offset random selections of the text to create a fragmented effect, I then saved these to different layers so that I could individually animate them in After Effects. In After Effects I took the layers and animated them to a dispersed position in relatively few frames so that there was a quick glitch sequence, I added stutter to create a lagging effect and then brought the fragments back to the main image again. I repeated the sequence a few times and applied a similar sequence to the Code image. This then completed my loop.

Newspeak Loop // Decoder Ring - Modest Mouse Poster

Whilst reading 1984, I knew I wanted to make a comment on the idea of Newspeak. Newspeak is the process of compounding words to create a new semi-language for the nation of Oceania in the Orwellian dystopia. "The destruction of words is a beautiful thing." according to brother Syme who worked on the Newspeak dictionary in the novel. This stuck with me as the destruction, abbreviation and compounding of words is happening in contemporary society due to the role of technology. At the moment. this destruction is minimal and almost solely reserved for comical benign words like "Lol" and "Twerk" ridiculous new words that have made it into the Oxford Dictionary this last year. But I believe that is one of the dangers an always-connected, sped-up, fibre-optic society that already has a dwindling attention span.

 This is an extract of an info graphic created by socialtimes.com that demonstrated the loss of attention span. Their studies show that attention span has dropped to just 5 seconds. This can be blamed upon the instant information gratification that social networking and internet searches can provide us, as well as short bursts of dynamic entertainment made possible by the web, Instagram, Youtube and Vines etc.

This loss of attention span could be a reason for the destruction of language and long prose we see today.
It is with a relatively small leap of the imagination that we can see ourselves speaking in a Newspeak-like language, roughly based on english but streamlined and dumbed-down so that only the plainest of utterances required to function in society exist. This is where Big Brother used Newspeak to its greatest 'advantage.' With limited expression, the language became a controllable tool for the totalitarian state to restrict creativity and flair. The language made it impossible to create expressive writings or even thoughts - restricting freedom and individuality.

Now, I must make it clear that I do not believe that words such as "Lol" and "Twerk" will lead us into a totalitarian state, all that I am exercising in this research is the way that language can be affected by technology and what the compounding of phrases into short, meaningless utterances can lead to.

After looking into this concept I knew what I wanted to portray but I wasn't quite sure how to present it. The answer came to me when I was browsing through Stoltze Design's book "1000 Music Graphics."and this poster for Modest Mouse designed by The Decoder Ring.

I enjoyed the simple style and layout of the poster. The silhouette of a young stylised woman reminded me of 1950's advertisements and the empty expression of subdued happiness on her face kind of made her look brainwashed. This combined with the hollow circle in place of a brain made it really seem like her thoughts were being controlled, perfect for a demonstration of Newspeak. I began to formulate an idea by working with the graphic, firstly I created a similar vector shape with the pen tool in Photoshop, making a few changes to the hairstyle so that the shape wasn't directly recognisable with Decoder's version. I then created an ellipse in the place of the 'brain' and my 'girl' shape was complete.

I wanted to make the silhouette more grunge-like so added a natural paper texture that i then applied to the vector through the content-aware fill tool. I turned the texture black and white and reduced the opacity. It was better but still not the desired effect, so I converted the vector to a selection and downloaded multiple grunge textures and applied them to the selection. After a short while of experimenting I was settled on a texture I liked. My initial planning was to create the colours with the intention of reversing them to negative in post production. So I added white overlays to the grunge patterns I had created.

Next was to incorporate the Newspeak element. I knew that I wanted to incorporate text from the book 1984 in this loop as I was particularly inspired by Syme's quote "It's a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words" I decided to take a passage of the text to use as a background, the legibility of the text wasn't important as the loop's purpose was to highlight the destruction. I chose an eroded typewriter text and laid the passage behind the girl shape. I extended the text box to extend past the canvas, this way i could animate it scrolling up and down behind the subject - I chose the scrolling animation to resemble the computer-like devices that Winston uses in the ministry of truth, where he uses newspeak to alter history and his destructive colleague Syme also works. When laying out the text behind the silhouette I decided there would be visual intrigue if there were two sets of text scrolling in opposite directions, this dual-screen kind of idea was inspired by Vannevar Bush's Memex Machine concept. This was a memory extender where facts can be recalled, edited and re-archived - I can see similarities in these devices and the devices used by Winston at The Ministry of Truth. 

Next was to animate the composition, I added position markers to the text to create a scrolling effect back and forth. I made the keyframes easy ease using the assistant to add a more convincing animation. I added a Newspeak in a 1950's font into the 'brain circle' of the girl. I rotated this around a point found through trial and error that didn't cut out any of the text through out its rotation course.
Next i added curved motion path animations to the Newspeak words that I had selected. I added dithering and buoyancy to create a pleasing motion curve that arced from the characters mouth to rise of the screen, in relation to the scrolling text.

I reverted the animation loop back to negative, it gave off an almost medical aesthetic which i enjoyed as it incorporated the technology of x-rays. I added the film grain and the negativity helped accent the Syme quote on the right hand side. All in all i was happy with the development of this experimental loop, I wasnt a hundred percent sure as to how to convey the message, but throughout trial and error and experimentation I achieved a visually pleasing loop with plenty of subtext and referential grounding.

Installation // Bruce Nauman - Preston

Last week I visited the Bruce Nauman display at the Harris museum in Preston. The exhibition was part of the Tates's Artist Rooms project and heres what the Tate has to say about Nauman.

American sculptor noted also for his environments, films and videotapes. Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Studied at the University of Wisconsin at Madison 1960-4 (first mathematics, then art), and at the University of California at Davis 1965-6. Stopped painting in 1965 and began to make objects, performance pieces and films.

The display included his famous "Violins, Violence and Silence" piece made out of neon tubes that are illuminated sporadically. Here is an image I captured of the sculpture in full illumination. 

I enjoyed the way the colours bled into each other as well as the almost incoherent placement of the lettering. "L's" and "E's" are inverted or flipped so that the word isn't immediately recognisable, drawing you into the piece. This may be something I look into as I plan to use some text in the loops for my sculpture. 

This is a photo taken outside Nauman's Changing Light Corridor With Rooms installation. I enjoyed the interactivity of the piece as you walk into and around the corridor experiencing different shadows left from the seemingly random that the lightbulbs are illuminated. The choice of light and dark seemed to be random, I'd like to try and replicate that as well as the interactive elements.

Competitor Analysis and Correspondance - Steve McWade // Three Dimensional Tanx

Last week I went to see Three Dimensional Tanx as they launched their new album. The night took the normal expected structure of support acts after support acts, but when the Tanx were due to play - all the lights dropped and the light show began.

I liked the effect of the black white and grey colour scheme. The mono chromaticism played nicely with the colours of the band's instruments but also allowed the animation to stand out from the black backdrop behind the band. The simplicity of the colours allowed the animations to take precedence. These were kept to simple geometric shapes and patterns, swirling and contorting on the command of the visual operator , Steve McWade.

Here is a close up of the projection hitting the surface of the singers keyboard/organ. I was particularly interested with how the animation interacted with the instrument. The flat back of the organ created another screen effectively and was uninterrupted as no movement passed in front of it. I would have been tempted to use this as a separate animation surface through projection mapping software. I feel this would have allowed for more creativity and maybe look for other surfaces where mapping could be implemented. In this case, however, McWade chose to treat the whole stage as a screen meaning that the animation warped and wrapped itself around the objects and musicians on screen. This created a certain visual aesthetic, but I would have least tried experimenting with mapping to create a more three-dimensional visual.

I managed to be introduced to Steve, stating that I too am interested in learning about the art of projected visuals. Steve was actually a recently graduated masters student, incorporating his projections into his post-graduate degree at Lancaster university. I managed to record our chat, but unfortunately I cannot upload it due to high background noise, this is a transcript;

Chris: Hi Steve, well done on the performance tonight.

Steve: Oh thanks, went pretty much all to plan.

C: So I noticed that you have a Zoom interface (Audio device) in front of you. Does that mean you are taking an audio input into your work?

S: Yeah thats what triggers the changes between animation loops. 

C: So through audio signals?

S: Well when the audio peaks yeah, if the singer screams or if the drummer hits the snare loudly. Its set to a timer though, so will only work every 30 seconds.

C: I suppose thats so its not flickering all the time and giving us all fits?

S: (laughing) Yeah like that.

Chris: I noticed that your animations were all black and white, was there a reason for this?

Steve: Well when we were setting up I was worried about the black backdrop, I'm used to working with white or lightly coloured surfaces. All those animations are actually coloured but when we set up my cable wasn't in the projector properly and it only came out in black & white, I thought it looked better on the backdrop and the band didn't seem to notice, or care!

C: Oh! You couldn't tell they were supposed to be coloured?

S: Yeah well there were a few that looked shit without colour, so I just dropped them.

Chris: I spotted your projector, is that dome around the lens to help the throw?

Steve: Yeah its a wide angled lens

C: So thats what was needed to cover the whole stage?

S: Yeah, a wide angled lens. Wide, Wide lens.