Friends and collaborators Hecuba are playing at the triple canopy launch party tomorrow night at SiteLA, and I’ll be doing some processing-powered live visuals during the show. If you’re in LA and looking for something to do it should be a great night.
Photo: Pitchfork
So everything went pretty well the other night. A few places wrote about the show and the band’s “unique” choice of fashion accessories. It was a difficult task of showing images from Lauren’s forthcoming book, many of which feature Devendra, while not showing too many pictures of him projected behind him which is just weird. We did our best and tried to pick the strongest shots that allowed for some fun animation potential. At one point, Devendra got upset about his image on the screen, but in the end I think it all worked out.
For the animations we used a combination of manual work in After Effects and procedural elements from processing. The procedural elements were fairly simple, some image averaging to blend faces together, some perlin noise to make images flap in the wind, a few particles, a little bit of random walking lines, and — in perhaps the most bizarre code I’ve ever written — recursively packing the space around Devendra and Greg using images of the prosthetic penises they wore for a Megapuss photo shoot with Lauren.
The entire animation lasted about 40 minutes, so I’ve compressed all that into a quick 1 minute video showing all the vignettes back-to-back. Something is definitely lost since we were going for a thick, slow, molasses-y feel to the whole thing, but who has 40 minutes on the internet?
On June 18th, Megapuss is having their debut performance at the Hammer Museum. To accompany the performance, and in celebration of her forthcoming book, Jon Beasley and I created a series of animated vignettes based on the photography of LA artist Lauren Dukoff.
More information on the Hammer Website.
I’ll be participating in the SoftWhere Software Studies Workshop next week at UCSD. This is one of the first events in the US focused on the meaning and goals of the emerging discipline of Software Studies. Most of the workshop is closed, but there is a public PechaKucha style presentation on Wednesday, May 21st, from 12:30-5:00pm. From the description: “Software studies is a research field that examines software and cyberinfrastructure using approaches from humanities, cultural criticism, and social sciences. The public session will feature a rapid series of short presentations by key national and international figures in this emerging field… Attendees can expect a collage of diverse perspectives on what it means to live in software society and how to study it.”
There are a lot of brilliant people involved and it proves to be a fun couple of days. More information at softwarestudies.com.
Beekeeper was an installation created in collaboration with Lita Albuquerque and Jon Beasley for a show titled “AOR” at the Frederick Weisman Museum at Pepperdine University. Lita envisioned the entire show operating as a single work concerned with the connection between the Earth and the cosmos and the transmutability of being. She often draws on themes from Mediterranean and Native American astronomy, the use of the stars by early navigators, and the investigations of physics and string theory; and through her research discovered that the bee has a long symbolic history in Egypt as a carrier of light and interchangeable with the stars. With that in mind, she envisioned the figure of a beekeeper slowly dissolving into the space around him. Slowly particles of the figure break off and begin moving out away from the figure, as time passes the pull increases and more and more particles break away until all that is left is slowly moving field of particles on black. Eventually the pull reverses, and the particles begin to move back to their original position only to start the process over again. The beekeeper becomes a swarm of bee/particles which in turn become a starry sky.
Two versions of the piece were made, each of a different initial figure of the beekeeper, and in the final installation each was projected on a different wall of a large room. These pieces were thematically paired with a short video “Starkeeper” which featured the figure of a astronaut being slowly concealed by fog which later dissolves to reveal a star-filled sky.
The software for Beekeeper started off simple enough. First the figure is extracted from the background and each pixel is made into a particle, which is then takes off in a random direction. But after working with Jon and Lita and discussing the behavior of the particles if became clear that something else was needed; and I became convinced that the conceptual elements of the piece should extend all the way to the code itself such that the execution of the code was, in a sense, the execution of what the code was portraying. Here are some diagrams which appeared in the catalogue:
I also wrote a short essay for the AOR catalogue where I discuss how the code works and the code’s relationship to the conceptual underpinnings of the piece.