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19 September 2004 by nathaniel

eat this

You can tell that nathaniel’s been busy when he hasn’t looked at his RSS aggregator in, like, weeks. Speaking of, anybody know of any good south african art RSS feeds? artthrob doesn’t have one (and their ‘weekly email update’ list, which I signed up for a few months ago, seems to be dead), and the great magazine art south africa, doesn’t even seem to have a web site.

Anyhow, it’s the mini-reblog issue of nathaniel and the non-aggressive; after all, it’s Sunday.

First, cuz all the kids are doing it:

You are (read: ‘nathaniel is’ – and I really did answer honestly for all of these questions) 55% geek
You are a geek. Good for you! Considering the endless complexity of the universe, as well as whatever discipline you happen to be most interested in, you’ll never be bored as long as you have a good book store, a net connection, and thousands of dollars worth of expensive equipment. Assuming you’re a technical geek, you’ll be able to afford it, too. If you’re not a technical geek, you’re geek enough to mate with a technical geek and thereby get the needed dough. Dating tip: Don’t date a geek of the same persuasion as you. You’ll constantly try to out-geek the other.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

everything you need to know from Bush’s RNC speech
The people over at LOOP TV & Film have knocked his 1 hour speech down to 3 minutes of essentials. One quote is, “To create jobs… we will make our country dependent… on foreign sources of energy!”

And finally, there’s Jonah Brucker-Cohen’s report from ISEA 2004. (not a rhizome member? go here)

Archives

13 September 2004 by nathaniel

jitter, round three

jit_workshop.jpg

photo credit: richard kilpert

Here’s a pic of a patch that two participants hacked together in day 3 of our workshop, which used a wacom tablet – both pressure, and the x/y grid when drawing – as a sensor for making music and images over live video. Other work included a VJ tool that used high amplitude beats to mix cellular patterns with live video, a proposed installation that took image snapshots whenever someone snapped their fingers and mixed these with an ongoing archive, an infra-red point tracking device that could follow participants around a room, and a tool that combined live body tracking, motion tracking and amplitude detection to cool effect for use in live performance.

Archives

12 September 2004 by nathaniel

dawning of a jit era

students.jpg

What a great day yesterday! Above, we’ve got a bunch of my “students” (ranging from PhDs in fine arts, to electronic musicians, video artists, analog VJs and graphic designers – even the Head of the Wits Digital Arts Department himself, Christo Doherty) in the Interactive Video workshop I’m currently offering at the Wits School of Arts. I kept promising how easy this stuff was going to be, even tho we blazed through it at lightning speed, which may have been a recipe for disaster in some people’s minds. But at the end of the day, all the groups managed to whip up some really interesting experiments!

jitter.jpg

photo credit: richard kilpert

Here’s a pic of everyone interacting with – and in awe of – a quick project that made the participants in a live video feed disappear (fade out to the same room, but empty!), depending on how much noise they created. It was thrown together by Kai Lossgott, Templar Wales and Christo (shown working together, right to left, in the top picture of this post) during the last 45 minutes of day 2. Seen and not heard, scene and not herd….

Today is the last day of the workshop; we’re going to learn a handful of more advanced features, then spend the rest of the day working on a few collaborative projects; I’m looking forward to seeing what these guys come up with! Here’s hoping this is the beginning of a great new community of media producers in Johannesburg.

Archives

11 September 2004 by nathaniel

eat, jitter, cindy

Ah, there is so much going on these days; so much to do, so little time (to blog about it).

First off, I’m not sure how many webland folks out there remember a little video installation I did out in Pretoria a few months ago, called eat. It was a video poetry installation, in a kind of slam style, which questioned consumer society’s active role in identity politics – mos def humorous.

Anyhow, Mr Nerf, my co-conspirator (along with Kathryn Smith) over at city+suburban studios, decided it was time to iterate; he stole the track and brought it round for a few friends to play with ‘in the studio’. This is the result (mp3 file, about 4.3MB). I have been asked to invite countertexts, more beats and music, responsive mp3s, whatever, for the next iteration of the remix. The final version (or perhaps several versions) will be included in the indy film, that guy, which is somewhere between a comedy and a documentary about Christian Nerf, by a few local filmmakers. The track is at 138 BPM – have a ball and contact me if you’ve got something you want to send our way.

In other news, yesterday was the start of Wits’ first Interactive Video Workshop – props to Christo for running with the ball on this one. It was about 7 months ago that we had our first workshop – which was open to Wits students/staff and outsiders alike – where Ralph Borland flew up from Cape Town to facilitate building ADC boxes, for everyone to make sensors speak serially to their computers. Since then, Christo – head of digital media at Wits – has organized 2 sound workshops, a stop-frame animation workshop, and now this workshop I’m leading, as an introduction to Jitter. We’ve got about 13 people signed up, and the first night showed some pretty excited cats. I’ll post some pix of the first hands-on day, tomorrow (er, today; having trouble sleeping).

bag_factory.jpg

And finally, above left we’ve got (clockwise from bottom left) Andrew – who has got the best print studio in Joburg, where this picture was taken – Ann Marie and Dora (I’m leaving out surnames cuz I can’t remember all of them, and I’m nothing if not consistent). Those two ladies are the current, international artists in residence at the bag factory (from England and Brazil, respectively); they’ve been holding workshops with local artists for the last few months, and will have an exhibition opening this Wednesday at the bag.

Last night, they did a screening of Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer, starring Carol Kane, Molly Ringwald and Jeanne Tripplehorn (Molly on the right; sooooo 16 candles). It’s a purposefully B-grade cheezball film with so many Ed Wood (etc) references it hurt. Circa 1994, and hilarious – I think it may have been the best film ever. That’s hot.

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06 September 2004 by nathaniel

interactive video workshop @ Wits, with Max, MSP + Jitter

For those who have not heard – please post far and wide; sign up if you can!

The ad reads:

Interactive Video workshop at Wits Digital Arts
Dates: 10 – 12 September (beginning Friday late afternoon, full day Saturday and Sunday)
Course Leader: nathaniel stern
Cost: R600
Who should attend: visual artists, VJs, performance artists, video practitioners and anyone interested in real time interactions between images, sound and performance.
Venue: The interactive media design lab at WSOA Digital Arts

Leading New Media artist nathaniel stern ( http://nathanielstern.com ), a graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, and lecturer on the Wits School of Arts’ Digital Arts MA programme, will be leading a two and a half day hands-on introductory workshop to Interactive Video.

This discipline combines the use of video cameras and computers in order to track bodies, motion, proximity, light and color for use in interactive installation, multimedia performance, and VJing. The workshop will cover a basic intro to all of the above, as well as real-time video mixing, scrubbing and effects, and the use of sound to generate and/or interfere with video.

The workshop will utilize Max/MSP and Jitter as its development environment. This application uses a simple, graphical interface (which looks very much like a flow chart) to accomplish the artist’s goals. For more information, see http://cycling74.com

Amongst the various activities, the two and half day workshop will explore examples of Interactive Video work by contemporary artists, suggest some of the other possibilities for tracking information from the physical world through cameras, and also look at other software and hardware available for tracking and manipulating audio and video.

Basic computer literacy and an interest in making things are the only requirements. However, those who attended the physical computing workshop with Ralph Borland should feel free to bring their ADC (Milmoe) boxes for use with video!

The money earned from this workshop will be used to purchase a licensed copy of Max/MSP + Jitter for Wits, which workshop-goers will have limited use of until the end of the term.

For more information, or to sign up, contact Ms Natalia Fiandeiro, WSOA Digital Arts, (011) 7174663 or fiandeiron@artworks.wits.ac.za

Archives

04 September 2004 by nathaniel

cypres, turbulence, franchise, gordart

claire_marcus.jpg

Left, there’s a picture of Claire Metais, communication officer from cypres. No, not Cypress, but cypres – Centre Interculturel de Pratiques Recherches et Echanges Transdisciplinaires; or, the Intercultural Centre for Practise, Research and Interdisciplinary Exchanges, which is based in Marseille, France.

Claire met with Franci Cronje and I to discuss similar interests, and see what could be done as far as exchanges, ongoing collaborations, and educational/artistic projects between France and South Africa.

At right, is, of course, Marcus Neustetter (we love him! Needless to say, Claire also had a very productive meeting with him while here, too. Da Man that he is). After catching up a bit (he had a great trip to ISEA and I was very jealous), we discussed our turbulence commission, which has seemed to morph into something much more interesting than originally planned: a kind of mock wiki of popular sites, made up of repainted logos-as-signs – it’ll begin by re-commissioning some signmakers downtown to paint famous tech logos for us, then allow others to upload their own versions into our database driven getAwaySites….

Afterwards, we talked about our next gallery show, getaway2, that is likely going to be sometime in March, at Franchise. It seems like our next duo exhibition will be much more collaborative than the first, and rather than beginning with digital work that we then texturize, we may be sending some experimental work from the physical world through ‘the crucible of The Digital,’ only to take it out again on the other side. What does that mean? Think scanner sculptures and printer installations that mimic or re-present Flesh, and you may have an idea.

Finally, I hit the gordart yesterday (gallery in Melville), and there was some very beautiful, if formalistic, work on show. For some reason, I managed to forget all about blogging when I was there, so I didn’t take any pictures or write down any names (bad nathaniel), but I’d recommend going if for no other reason than the cleverness of the glass-blown work and the most beautiful framing I’ve seen in a long time – of some fungi, no less (have to see it to believe it).

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