Archive for April, 2011

The Club is a moving-image digital collaging of 57 images of selected North American politicians, business men, and psychopaths from the eighties till the present. There’s also a linked slideshow of some stills from the video.

The politicians are conservatives who have blasted away both at home and abroad. Via deregulation, the shock doctrine, and explicitly military means. The business men are CEO’s who are mostly now behind bars, or have been. The psychopaths include (Ex-Colonel) Russell Williams who, until the time of his arrest for two sex murders, headed CFB Trenton, the largest military air-base in Canada.

So it’s a bit of a Dorian Gray piece. But they are each others’ deformities.

Here’s what Andy Warhole said about The Club: “they look like some kind of Auschwitz-Chernobyl mutant legacy, and maybe they are — this is like morphing, blocpix, mr. potatohead, and various slice-n-dice technologies… but not them — this is new — and of course i love your politics 🙂 ”

Much of the work I’ve done with dbCinema, the graphic synthesizer I wrote in Adobe Director, has been toward beauty. This is quite different. But The Club was still made with dbCinema. There’s other work I’ve done with dbCinema here.

So much history is buried beneath our feet, and histories buried in other ways, by forgetfulness or disregard. If you live in a former mining area in Britain, that history is deep underground. Evidence of the coal mines have been erased from the landscape, swept away in less than a generation. Deeper still in the past there’s a buried history of women working underground too. When I found out about the women miners, I thought of my sister, the sculptor, Melanie Wilks, working on the site of a former colliery turned into parkland, hand-carving stone on the very ground above where those pasts are buried.

Such fragments of contemporary life and shards of history I hauled together to build Underbelly in digital media, collaging a rich and often grotesque mix of imagery, spoken word, video, animation and text. It’s an interactive story about a woman artist who, while sculpting on the site of a former Yorkshire colliery, is haunted by a medley of voices.

Melanie Wilks carving on site of former power station, picketed during 1984 Miners’ Strike

It includes video of my sister carving and the voices are performed by me. The historical content is drawn from the testimonies of 19th Century women miners collected by Lord Ashley’s Mines Commission of 1842, which exposed working conditions in the pits.

Sisters

My sister and I were raised in Morley, an industrial town in Northern England, whose prosperity in previous centuries was built on shoddy mills, coal mining and quarrying. Our family has lived in this area for generations and, although we both moved away, we found ourselves returning to Morley to live. Read the rest of this entry »

Jörg Piringer is a sound poet and poet-programmer currently living in Vienna/Austria. He really knows what he’s doing with the programming, having a master’s degree in Computer Science. And his sound work, both in live performance and in synthesis with the auditory and visual processing, is quite remarkable. I saw him in Nottingham and Paris, and was very impressed on both occassions.

He’s just released a new piece, a video called Unicode. It’s a 33:17 long, and simply displays Unicode characters. Each character is displayed for about 0.04 seconds. The video displays 49,571 characters.

It’s a video, but it’s a conceptual piece. The characters in this video are all symbols and each makes but the briefest appearance. A cast of thousands; Bar and Yeace.

Wikipedia describes Unicode thus:

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems. Developed in conjunction with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard, the latest version of Unicode consists of a repertoire of more than 109,000 characters covering 93 scripts, a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding methodology and set of standard character encodings, an enumeration of character properties such as upper and lower case, a set of reference data computer files, and a number of related items, such as character properties, rules for normalization, decomposition, collation, rendering, and bidirectional display order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts).[1] As of 2011, the most recent major revision of Unicode is Unicode 6.0.

Piringer’s Unicode simply shows us symbols but, to me, it illustrates how our notion of language has been expanded to not only the multi-lingual but also to include code. Not only do we see many of the world’s scripts but a good deal of abstract symbols of code.

By the way, his web site at joerg.piringer.net is well worth checking out.