Assesment guide through unit two.

I will do this review of my progress reverse chronologically.

The first presentation I gave to my new class after returning from a year out was awful, I was unprepared and blasé –  the presentation went badly. see a blog entry about that here - http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/thoughts-after-my-presentation-on-tues-1812011/

I wanted my next presentation to be better

My Pecha Kucha presentation was delivered live ( I have subsequently made a video version which can be viewed here ) –  http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/progress-report/  I would happily submit only this as support of my work, I feel this was strong.

Retrospectively I can now see a big oversight in the plan I outlined during this presentation, the video data base that I started with was not as versatile as I thought it would be, I started using H.D video for the first time in unit two and as soon as I did all of my SD material seemed aesthetically inferior, thus I had to start building a new media data-base from scratch. I started  walking and recording new footage with the college’s Panasonic hs9 camera  (the only 3 chip camera available through CLS) .

I managed to create some nice material through these efforts see freeze frames from some of my favourite clips here –   http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/08/14/stills-gallery_from-my-video-database/

Thus all of the videos featured in my database have been filmed and colour corrected in unit two of this course. I currently have 147 clips in my data base (the number will continue to grow throughout the exhibition) it should be noted that most of my effort in unit two was towards shooting video.  A lot of time was spent in After Effects also, have not really commented much on this side of my process since it is the most tedious, nothing interesting to say about it really. The reason I had to spent so long in After Effects is Because Pure Data can’t really handle HD video, so I have to reformat everything as SD motion jpeg. The problem with this is that these re-formatted videos look completely different to the after effects previews which feature high definition footage, It has been a long process of trial and error in After Effects to try and get down scaled down HD video to still look like HD video. There was not much point in blogging about the video processing side of things as; (A) it was was very tedious and (B) I was too busy doing it (+ there is also the fact that I can’t connect to the internet while running an illegitimate copy of certain software) .

The other major technical part of my process was pure data, I did not start using Pure Data until unit two of this course.  It is easy to see my progress in this area by looking at these blog entries which present the evolution of my patch.

http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/my-first-pure-data-experiment/ (it looks so cute now when I look at it)

bellow are later PD experiments.  with video examples

http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/pd-patch-variation-1/

http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/looking-at-vertov-and-more-pd-experiments/

the above link describes an important moment in my projects evolution with a little help from Dzaga Vertov I realized a simple method for organizing my material (one that I have stuck too).

http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/08/28/my-pure-data-patch-middle-screen/

http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/08/28/my-pure-data-patch-outer-screens/

These last two examples show my finished patch.

My knowledge of pure data is still minimal, but I am happy with the progress I have made in a small time and the patch I have created serves the purposes of the project that I outlined, so no need for it to do any more just yet.

A good description of my final piece of work can be found here  http://www.mada2011.com/?page_id=70

My reflective essay can be found here http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/08/29/final-reflection/

it contains details of my exit strategy from this course and my plans for the future.

Final reflection.

Reflective Paper.

My piece entitled ‘Shuffle’ is now installed and fully functional within the exhibition space. The work itself is in no way – finished, or resolved, but I am happy with the product I have so far developed and feel proud to exhibit this prototype as an embodiment of a rewarding creative process.

Blogging was the first significant skill I learnt on this course and it is also one of the most beneficial. This practice provided oversight to both units of the M.A and has proven enormously helpful as a means of merging my theoretical interests and my practical work.  Through my blog I have been able to tie together, or pin down some erratic thoughts and ideas that would have otherwise drifted away from each other.

The Objectives chapter of the study proposal I wrote early into the course concluded with the following statement ;-

‘ I have a lot of interests that are related but perhaps not complementary, while I have no hope of decidedly realising all of the objectives defined here, I would like to find a way to package and deploy these ideas and potentialities in a more concise way, without generalising or trivialising my research interests, I think this should be my ultimate objective.’

http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/study-proposal/

With regard to this statement one of the incredible things about this project is that I feel as though I have actually managed to package and deploy my research interests though my practice work and I think this can be attributed to a dialogue between the two which has emerged from blogging.

Words are important to me and the blog has given me an outlet through which to interrogate the conceptual motives of my work.  Earlier during the course I felt frustration because I had identified some thematic interests that were motivating my practice, yet there was no strong sense of cross over between theory and practice in the work, I felt as though I had to use conceptual reasoning to defend and carry my work and that it could not defend itself, this feeling was brought to the surface during a painful crit where I was not permitted to talk and it tortured me for many months after.

The main reason I am so happy with my installation is because I feel as though it is an embodiment of a conceptual journey as much as a practical one, not only are my conceptual ideas effectively packaged and deployed through my practical work, but also I am in a place whereby; the practice itself is actually carrying the theory, I can no longer tell if my words inform my work, or if my work informs my words. This is a beautiful place to be in and I have not felt this inspired to make work for a long time, (if ever). Making and thinking have somehow become synonymous with each other, and I never thought this was possible for me, since I generally suffer from a highly strung analytical mindset which in the past has lead me into periods of procrastination. In this respect the course has been a massive success for me and a life changing experience.

The best form of evidence I can present to show how my theory and practice have merged is the Tag Cloud which is featured on my blog.

I have become fixated with this somewhat and it has become a brilliant means of comparative analysis, I think the Tag Cloud serves as a fantastic representation of my project. Not only am I able to talk in length about how any one of these tags relates to my exhibited work, I am also able to draw lines that cross any number of points and talk about how my work connects these themes/ ideas.

Apart from blogging discussion was one of the main things that has helped to inform my present ideas, there were some discussions and arguments between myself and other students that were extremely interesting and that will stay with me for ever. Among the most significant are possibly a discussion with Noel about whether lines connect or dissect , a discussion with Simon and Zai about the difference between wandering, the derive and being lost and an intense argument with Tim about the importance of human authorship in a context of programmatically driven art,  these are just a few examples, there are countless others, of discussions  I have had through the duration of this course. I feel as though my work is entirely indebted to the other students and the ideas and experiments that they have shared with me.

Since I have claimed that my theory and my practice have become inseparable let me now outline both simultaneously before considering my exit strategy from this course.

My Video Art.

For many years I have been exploring the medium of video within an artistic context, what I love about video is the process of capturing and it’s ability to merge disparate moments and fleeting glances and provide context for such phenomena. The process of video art that I am engaged in is not about passive observation, it is a spontaneous engagement that finds expression in moments where meaning takes place neither, within the screen/viewfinder nor, the external world around it – but somewhere in a crack between the two.

I am interested in mythology, superstition and mystical belief systems. What I love about these strands of culture is their ability to adapt, evolve and respond while constantly re-evaluating  the symbols they absorb.

I see mythology, superstition and mysticism as a means of archiving the symbolic in a manor that gives life to an ephemeral sense of meaning, a form of meaning that can be evoked, but never defined or captured.

The description of my work that I offer on our show’s promotional website is as follows;

‘Shuffle is motivated by Paradoxical enquiries into methods of capturing the ephemeral and searching for the meaning in the search for meaning.’

it consists of a media library that is played in an unpredictable order through an interface designed within the pure data programming language.’

What would it be like if our brains had a ‘Shuffle’ feature; if we could experience the world as a de-contextualised succession of moments and impressions?

Would we find serenity in blissful waves of meaningless stimulation. Or would we become consumed by the void of nothingness between sensory pulses?’

While I have always been drawn to video because of its potential as a spontaneous act, I have been struggling to find inspiration in the process of post-production. Actually I hate the term ‘post production’, to me post production has always felt more like a post mortem. I am thus excited to have found a way to reconfigure my video production process so that less emphases is placed on the linear alignment of dead material. My material is able to re-invent itself within the context I have designed and can engage in a dialogue with a whole library of material and not just that which is placed behind/in front on a linear time line.

What I have designed with ‘Shuffle’ is not a resolved body of work, but a demonstration of a methodology through which my practice of Video Art can be taken to a higher level, both personally and conceptually.

Plans for the future.

My artistic process has developed a new flexibility and the notion of place is no longer relevant to my work, thus my artistic explorations are starting to feel slightly tethered by my base in south east London. I want to use my video practice as a means of exploring disparate parts of the world. For me at the moment my art work is about journeying and searching, I feel it is time to leave my home in London behind me for a while. What I would ideally like is to create a situation where my income is not fixed to a specific location. Two methods for achieving this are online stock footage sales – www.pond5.com is a site that specializes in this, and from which I am already getting regular payouts with just a handful of standard definition clips uploaded. During unit two of this course I have recorded numerous hours of HD footage, and already created a library of polished clips from that material so far – 143 to be accurate all of these clips could be sold individually as stock footage. My other idea is teaching, I would like to find an opportunity to teach art theory, first I have enrolled on a course to get my TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) I can use teaching English as a stable income for a while when I am travelling a building my database of video and searching for other teaching opportunities. I always find it difficult to talk about a profession in art, not even sure if I want one, for me my artwork is something that I use to give meaning and a sense of purpose to my life, there is little financial motivation in what I make. I however I have the motivation to seek new situations and contexts to explore my work, I would like to apply for some art festivals and residencies, I am also actively seeking collaborators as I feel the interface I have designed could serve as a premise for some interesting collaborations, thus I am inviting some potential collaborators to the show, (already have confirmations from an animator studying at RCA, a performance artist/ P.H.D student and a high profile sound designer) and I will be presenting my work as a prototype or a spring board from which to base a collaboration of some capacity.

I feel both excited and nervous about having my open-ended work on display in a rudimentary form amid some pieces which are highly resolved and precisely executed.

I am still very much looking forward to spending time in the exhibition space during our show and defining the strands of interrelation that must exist between some works, works that on the surface seem vastly different.  I am thus looking forward to few more interesting discussions with my peers  before we are done.

The bottom line is that I feel proud of the work I have in this exhibition and proud to have been part of this course.

My Pure Data Patch Middle Screen.

This is the patch which controls the middle screen within my installation, this patch is different from the outer screens one since 5o% of the time it plays clips of the Canary wharf building in a portrait ratio and the rest of the time it plays footage from my database in a landscape ratio.

Now that my installation is fully functional I can make adjustments and improvements as they occur to me and I intend to conduct some fine tuning of my Puredata patch between exhibition opening hours.

My Pure data patch outer screens.

This is the final version of my pure data patch for the outer two screens.

It is very simple, but still the most sophisticated patch I have built to date.

The metronome object is used to  synchronise the play back of ‘random’ (referring to the random object within P.D)  videos and sounds from my data base and also to alternate the position of two Gemheads within the screen space.

Outer screens top level patch. 

Sub Patches

The videos within my database are organized based on the themes – Inward, Outward, Left to right and Right to left. The movselectA and movselectB objects are nested within my patch. The random number object is used to select a category and then a clip within that category.

movselectA

movselectB 

This is the same as movselectA only the categories are inverted, thus if category’ inward’ is selected in movselectA then category ‘outward’ will be selected in movselectB.

wavselectA + wavselectB

There is one unique sound for each video ‘wavselectA/B’ controls the playback and functions in the same way as  ’movselectA/B’

In my installation this patch is running on two computers which are networked together, it thus creates almost perfect synchronizing between the 4 channels of video featured on the outer two screens. Thanks to Ed Kelly for help setting up the network and also giving me his timeseed and dsp_meter patches which I have also utilized.

The poetics of space.

“A philosopher who has evolved his entire thinking from the fundamental themes of the philosophy of science, and followed the main line of the active, growing rationalism of contemporary science as closely as he could, must forget his learning and break with all his habits of philosophical research, if he wants to study the problems posed by the poetic imagination. For here the cultural past doesn’t count. The long day-in, day-out effort of putting together and constructing his thoughts is ineffectual. One must be receptive, receptive to the image at the moment it appears: if there be a philosophy of poetry, it must appear and re-appear through a significant verse, in total adherence to an isolated image; to be exact, in the very ecstasy of the newness of the image. The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche, the lesser psychological causes of which have not been sufficiently investigated.”

From The poetics of space. by Gaston Bechelard

Blurb about my work 3.0

What would it be like if our brains had a ‘Shuffle’ feature; If we could experience the world as a de-contextualised succession of moments and impressions? Would we find serenity in the blissful waves of meaningless stimulation, or would we become consumed by the void of nothingness between sensory pulses?

 

Blurb about my work 2.0

Andrew Burgess’s meditative video interface entitled shuffle is on public view for the first time during the M.A digital arts show at Camberwell.

This work is motivated by Paradoxical enquiries into methods of capturing the ephemeral and searching for the meaning in the search for meaning.

Shuffle consists of a media database that is played in an unpredictable order through an interface designed within the Pure Data programming environment.

It has been designed to describe an unresolved journey into a landscape of de-contextualisation and unlearning.

Stills gallery_from my video database.

This gallery contains 40 photos.

Progress report. What I am doing and what I am not doing but probably should be doing.

Starting to get a bit overwhelmed by the work load in front of me, can see potential to make an interesting entry to the show, but I also feel that potential getting weaker by the day as the deadline gets closer and closer.
At the moment all the free time I have is being consumed by filming and editing video footage for my database. While there is a programmatic element to my work the most important ingredient is the videos. I feel there are some strong clips within my database, there are also some weaker clips and some that I just can’t live with any more. I have a college camera booked for a week starting Tuesday 16th of August this will be the last opportunity I have to go out and film more material! What I want to do is replace about 15 existing clips and create about 50 more. This is ambitious though quite realistic.
Anyway because I am spending so much time on that, it is easy to overlook certain other important things that need to be done.
Not much time to blog either, so figured I would write something extremely practical such as a things to do list, as a means of communicating what I am up to and also as a way of concentrating my energies a bit.

Things to do list Deadline Friday 26th of August !

Creating my own page on the show website set up by Melanie. (think this needs to be finished this weekend, i.e done tomorrow!).
Ordering screens online I need two more HP s2031a – 20” monitors, this seems easy enough in theory, though I don’t actually have any money. This makes life a bit trickier. Hmmn ! _ Should probably do some more overtime at my job, (starting to sense some more late nights on the horizon)  . Need the screens to arrive next week anyway, as I intend to be onsite every day setting up the show the week after next.
Promoting the show this is important a lot of people I want to invite, a lot of people it would be rude not to invite. But who are they, I reckon I need to prune my own email / facebook contacts a bit and see about engaging in some promotional activities both personal and within the groups collective efforts.
I need to configure the computers I am using; this means installing a second graphics card on my own computer, then taking my computer to Camberwell and networking it to the linux machine I have set up there. My P.D patch is virtually ready (Have a feeling I am going to regret this statement!) My understanding is that all I need to do is send a bang across the network from one machine and one patch to another. Does not sound that hard if I can just get help from Ed or Jonathan setting up the Network then I will be happy (and a lot more relaxed).
Also there is some kind of retrospective journal or an essay or something that I need to do, an email briefing has been sent out with regard to this. I have not properly comprehended the information within it yet !, should probably try and do that and make a start on the academic stuff I need to do as course requirements, I guess there is a lot on my blog already that I can edit. So I think it is better to wait and see if I can achieve a bit more practical stuff before I begin my final retrospection. But I do need to start considering this briefing a bit now, as this will hopefully help me to image how I might resolve this project.
As mentioned already I want to make the number one priority editing, filming and adding the final clips to my database. It is very late in the course to still be doing this !, but I feel like my material is nearly there it just needs one final big effort to make it stronger. Next week is the final week for doing this so, after that I will just settle with the database as it is, it is important to set myself this deadline as it would be easy to become obsessive with the video element and overlook everything else, Video is the area I have invested in most and it is the videos which I care about more than anything else.
Also I have to  build my installation the most time consuming things here will be designing and making brackets to hang my three screens (hanging them vertically) and also making a box to hide away the computers and power-points.

Pd experiments_ Trying to enhance the feeling of unpredictability.

Have spent some time trying to adopt the Markov Element, introduced to me by Ed Kelly.

The Markov Element is basically a probability chain,  a number is passed into the chain, (in this case the output of the random 101 object).

The $1-$8 variables are defined when evoking the patch for example if I were to use the object; [Markov_Element 3 5 8 9 11 30 40 80]. If a number equal or smaller than 3 were passed into the chain it will output the first message, if equal or smaller than 5 the second, 8 the third and so on. Thus if the random number object were to output the number 41 – in this case the 7th value in the markov chain will be sent (70 in this example).

  Here I have used several Markov Chains in conjunction with one another. The random selector is used to determine which chain to evoke in a particular instance, the numbers which are passed out of the Markov chain are then used to determine the range on a new random generator.

There are three random generators which output numbers in alternation, one outputs a ‘randomish’ number from a range set by the Markov Elements, another outputs a ‘randomish’ number from a range set by the Markov Elelments and is seeded by the timeseed object (more about that later) and the third outputs a number from a range of 77 and is also seeded by the timeseed object.

It is not pretty but it seems to be working quite well and giving me a nice random feeling.

I can not implement this method properly in my patch until I have arrived at a fixed number of video and sound clips within my database. The example here has a range of 101 thus if I had 101 clips in my database I could use this as a sub patch and get a nice feeling of pseudo-randomness in the selection order of my material. However I am looking to have a greater range than this, so no point actually implementing this technique until I have finished recording and creating material.