Category: Uncategorized

This weekend I finished my latest in a number of riffs on Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room. This latest, reposting the same image over and over to Instagram, achieved a lot of what I’ve been searching for lately so it feels like good point to stop and take stock of who else has been using “the room” as a method of exploring iterative decay and its effects.

The Original

MP3s on UbuWeb

Video

Patrick Liddell: I Am Sitting In A Video Room

Guy Evans: Out Of Space

Photography

Mary Lucier: Polaroid Image Series

“Between 1969 and 1974 Mary Lucier made a series of slide projection works titled Polaroid Image Series, begun as a collaboration with the composer Alvin Lucier and based on the structure of his composition for voice and tape, I am sitting in a room. In this sound work, Alvin Lucier recorded himself reading a text describing the making of the work. The recording was played back into the room repeatedly, rerecorded each time, until the original statement became unintelligible as a representational form, leaving only the resonant frequencies of the room and the rhythm of speech. Following the same structure, Mary Lucier introduced an original Polaroid photograph through a Polaroid copier, thus beginning a sequence of 50 images in which each subsequent generation becomes itself a copy of the one before it. As in Alvin Lucier’s sound work, small errors that occurred during the process were incorporated into the work and amplified as it progressed. The resulting 50 black and white slides were projected sequentially, along with the original thirteen-minute audio work.”

Charles Calloway: I Am Instagramming In A Room

Text to Speech

Sebastian Tomczak: I Am Sitting In A Room (MacSpeech and TextEdit Version)

Type

Antonio Roberts: I Am Sitting In A Room

Any more?

Let me know by email or in the comments.

An experiment to see how common Photoshop filters might effect a piece of music when applied to its spectrograph.

The first 80 seconds of audio from Beethoven’s Fifth was ripped from YouTube and fed into the ANS synth. This produced a spectrogram which was exported and edited in Photoshop using tools in the Filter menu. The resulting manipulated spectrogram was then played back, and recorded, in the ANS synth.

Original audio

Original in ANS

Crystalised filter

Extrude filter

Find Edges filter

Halftone filter

Pinch filter

Polar Stretch filter

Note 1: Vimeo is my preferred video hosting service but they rejected two of the videos due to copyright infringement. I had assumed a composition by someone who’s been dead for 188 years would be out of copyright, but I forgot that performances are copyrighted too. Thanks, Royal Philharmonic. YouTube is happy to host the videos because it’ll put ads next to them, which is why I pay to use Vimeo because YouTube’s ads are obnoxious and intrusive. So it goes.

But this is actually really interesting. When does my manipulation of the music stop it being recognised, and how far after that point does it continue to be recognisable? The Crystalised filter is probably in that zone.

I think the next stage would be to repeat this for a massive number of effects and chop and slice between them somehow. And to not use a recording in the copyright ID database…

Note 2: Yes, very Wendy Carlos…

I had this idea a couple of months ago and have been itching to try it out. The idea is simple, and once again plays on Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room, a work I’ve been referencing for what seems like years now. The text rather nicely explains the work.

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.

Here it is on YouTube:

The key thing that interests me here is something to do with slow entropy and finding, or not being able to find, the point at which the “pixels” (or their equivalent) no longer form a representation of the original thing, and then what the remaining void means in itself. Slow entropy is fascinating wherever you find it, from the You Are Here point on a poster map where repeated touching has worn a hole to desire lines worn in grass verges that weren’t meant to be walked across.

But I digress. This current experiment is slightly different to the strict Lucier and I think it’s going to take a few goes to get right. The basic idea is to photograph a portion of a room and then project that photograph back, aligning it as closely as possible with the room. Then I take another photograph of the projection in the room and so on.

This has involved me investigating projection mapping, something all the cool digital artists are poking at, specifically the demo version of MadMapper which is fairly easy to use.

Anyway, here’s the first attempt, three photos starting with a clean shot and then two projections.

A failure, to be sure, but if we don’t record our failures… Next I think I’ll try something simpler.

On Sunday at the special Magic Cinema for Still Walking I showed a film I made in 2009 for Jon Bounds’ 11 Bus project where he invited people to travel on Birmingham’s Outer Circle bus route on November 11th to see what happened. I decided to do it on my bike with the task of photographing every other bus stop in the clockwise direction with the TTV contraption attached to my camera. While liking a few shots I remember being slightly disapointed with the the photos as a whole and this film was an attempt to make sense of them.

The film takes the fortuitously titled song Outer Circle by local band Woodbine and runs through the photos in sequence, starting by my house in Stirchley and going all the way around through the afternoon into the winter evening.

Watching it again projected on a screen in a room full of people forced me to see it with fresh eyes and I was rather pleased with how it stood up. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, especially when explaining your art process, and I could see some really interesting themes in there.

The main one was this idea that street furniture like bus stops is a design constant. The 11 bus goes through a wide variety of districts and communities in Birmingham (I recommend it to all newcomers to get a sense of the diversity of Birmingham) but the bus stops are all the same. The repetition of this sameness emphasises the differences and turned out to be a rather neat device.

Of course it helps that the music is great. I love the “11a, 11b” refrain towards the end.

Thanks to Andy of The Magic Cinema for recognising it was interesting and forcing me to make a higher quality version for screening.

The Creative Hacktivism seminar at the not-even-started-the-refurb BOM venue had the usual mix of good and dull stuff but the highlight was probably Robert M Ochshorn whose presentation reminded me of being at Resonate a few months ago. He’s one of those people who casually demonstrates something that is effectively from “the future” and then more casually mentions he’s moved on from that a couple of years ago. He also ran his presentation from the command line. No powerpoint, just shell commands. Hardcore. Sadly his website has nothing on it relating to his talk - he did apologise for this - but I made copious notes in big exciting handwriting.

One of his goals is to visualise a whole film at once, to be able to visually browse a time-based medium. Related to this was a PDF reader where the thumbnails were displayed behind a floating reader window showing where in the publication you are. These are not novel. Video editing has a visual scrubber. PDFs have thumbnail views. But the way he integrated these into the reading / viewing experience was interesting.

Where he used slitscan to visualise films obviously caught my attention since I’m well into slitscan though I’d not thought of it as a way of effectively thumbnailing a temporal sequence. A film still just captures 1/24th of a second. A slitscan shows, or at least represents, a much longer period of time.

But using slitscan as an indexing tool implies a level of literacy which we might take for granted in other forms. I asked Robert about this and he agreed. We do “read” thumbnails and try to make sense of their abstractions. This is not something I’d really considered before but it ties in with a lot of my thinking, bringing photographic composition into the realm of symbolism and such. One of those nice “click!” moments.

One of Robert’s projects was a visual index of every Godard film. The screen showed them all as slitscanned thumbnails which the viewer could scrub through, amongst other things. I was struck by how the traffic jam scene, made with long tracking shots, in Weekend jumped out and was immediately recognisable to me. Another scene of a woman dancing in a window was not necessarily recognisable but clearly showed a moving subject shot with a fixed camera. Similarly you can tell when the film is full of fast jump-cuts because the scan becomes noisy.

Slitscan images made from films are interesting because they compress time into a single image. But if you don’t know how a slitscan is made you might assume it’s still an image of a single moment, not lots of moments compressed into one.

This evening I tried an experiment. I took that traffic jam scene from Weekend and turned it into a slitscan (extracting 10 frames per second). It looks like this. (click for full size)

I also squashed it into a 3:2 rectangle.

I then posted it to Twitter, telling people it was a scene from a film and asking them to name it. Here are the answers people gave:

• The Italian Job
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (French castle scene)
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Knights who say Ni)
• Falling Down
• Get Carter
• Shaun of the Dead (back garden first zombie scene)
• Four Weddings and the Funeral
• Life of Brian (stoning scene)
• Clockwork
• Quadrophenia

The Italian Job was the most popular guess and the cars do look a bit like Mini Coopers in Red White and Blue.

What I think we’re seeing here is thumbnail literacy but for stills rather than for slitscan. Most people don’t know how a slitscan is made, even those who’ve been following my work. The idea that this represents 7 minutes or so of a film is not obvious. So people fall back on the more common method of looking for symbols and icons. Those colours, the era. Interesting that along with The Italian Job you also have Get Carter and Quadrophenia.

On reflection I maybe should have chosen a more well known film (only one person got it right) but the wrong answers were actually more interesting. They show they is some kind of dominant thumbnail literacy out there and that if we want to use different sorts of visual abstractions to represent time and space we need to take those into account.

Here’s the original scene:

Pic at top by Joseph Kesisoglou