Billboard #451

Inspired by Kelly Richardson's hyperrealistic landscapes often depicting the impossible, Billboard #451 takes viewers on a neverending journey down a highway while being fed video ads. The title is a direct reference to Fahrenheit 451, a novel by Ray Bradbury. In the story, the billboards that adorn the highways are stretched to 200 feet in order for dangerously fast drivers to view them without distortion.

For Billboard #451, I used video as a medium that could be manipulated in Adobe Premiere and After Effects. I selected contemporary commercials that would appeal to the characters in the novel: a Roku 4 ad for the obsession of binge-watching TV series on high-definition screens, and an Audi ad for those who enjoy high-speed joyrides as a form of entertainment. The third billboard frames a public book burning, the most prominent theme of the novel, but from a stationary position the video is incomprehensible to the point where only the fire can be made out. Individuals who do not partake in this sort of activity will see the distorted perspective of the collective.

This video is an exploration on variable form and the perception of space inside a virtually composed environment. According to Lev Manovich's Understanding Hybrid Media, "everything inside the frame keeps changing: visual elements, their transparency, the texture of the image, etc." (Manovich). In the nighttime portion, not only the primary frame contains a view from a moving vehicle, but the two billboards frame separate video tracks, resulting in an endless loop of dynamic imagery. In the daytime portion, the source footage's width and height is stretched to sit along the side of the road while the video plays. The cloud's shadows on the billboard are moving layers of solid colour with varying edge feathering and transparency, adhering to the variable form aspect while contributing to the realistic possibility of gargantuan billboards existing in our world.

I added an audio track to the film from the TV series Black Mirror with enough filters to simulate a radio playing - a speech against society's addiction to the glamour of television and buying intangible objects - drowned out by the noisy traffic. In the end, the speaker is cut off as though they were censored, not unlike the level of censorship that is inherent in Fahrenheit 451's world.


Works Cited:

Lev Manovich – Understanding Hybrid Media, Published in Betti-­Sue Hertz, ed., Animated Paintings (San Diego: San Diego Museum of Art, 2007)

work | play is a piece which explores duality in my identity as a worker and a recreationist. My approach is partly inspired by Sophie Calle's In Character: Self-Portrait of the Artist as Another installation, where the motivation is to display my physical possessions which represent both sides of my identity. Referencing a line from Themes of Contemporary Art - Identity, "identity is expressed by other means as well, including by words, symbols, objects, and settings" (Robertson, McDaniel). The way Rodney Graham stages the scenes he want to photograph also influenced the importance of setting up the display in my work. A few of his photos omit himself as the subject which expresses his identity as an artist, such as Potatoes Blocking My Studio Door.

In this context, the hanging lightbox installation acts as a framing device for the shelf that holds my video game collection, particularly the games that I have yet to complete. The arrangement of game boxes seem unstable, uncertain if they will hold up. Obscured in the shadows is my laptop, open with a computer programming environment and a public list of my projects, many unfinished. Barely visible is my hand reaching out to the keyboard to continue working. Both the games and the laptop are physical manifestations of burdens that help uphold my identity: the type of player I am derived from the games I buy and display, and the type of programmer I am based on the projects I have worked on. It is a show of my struggle against material obsession, the pursuit of a balance between owning so many games but not playing them due to my studies and work, and so many unfinished projects due to making time for playing video games. Behind, the light peeking through the crevices is eerie with an unknown source, invoking an ambiguous emotion, reflecting my conflicting views.

The title work | play is a reference to computer programming logic where the two operands work and play are evaluated as work OR play and if one of these is true, then the statement is true, further expressing the dual presence of the two parts of my identity.


Works Cited:

Graham, Rodney. Potatoes Blocking My Studio Door. Digital image. Rodney Graham | Artists | 303 Gallery. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Nov. 2016. <http://www.303gallery.com/artists/rodney-graham?view=slider#29>.

In Character - Self Portrait of the Artist as Another (Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival Catalogue 2014)

Robertson, Jean, and Craig McDaniel. Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.

mind in a jam

Glitch Art

My main intention for mind in a jam is to capture the essence of being stuck in traffic. At times like this, my psychological state is in disarray, a conglomerate of impatience, frustration, anger, regret, apathy, and everything in-between, even the unexpected instances of relief and relaxation of not having to keep my foot to the pedal. Bits of vehicles are visible, even a distinct license plate can be seen, reminiscent of being behind the same car for long periods of time.

Takeshi Murata is my primary source of inspiration for this piece. His videos that are a result of corrupted data is create an ethereal world where one frame blends into the next. At times, some of his works have a "smeared paint" effect from multiple datamoshed frames, reminiscent of Monica Tapp's paintings depicting motion-blurred landscapes.

mind in a jam's process involves taking footage from a dash cam and converting it from .MP4 to uncompressed .AVI using Avidemux. Next, the video is opened in Frhed, a hex editor, where I replaced all occurrences of "no" to "go" and saved the video. Finally, I opened the video in Windows Media Player rather than my usual go-to PotPlayer, where I take a screenshot of a corrupted frame.

The reading GlitchCodecTutorial by Nick Briz mentions the following: "If you take this same file . . . save it on a memory stick and open it on another computer through various media players you'll notice that you often get very different results" (Briz). This is crucial in the process of creating mind in a jam. In this time and age, videos are meant to be universal files that are easily shared and viewed, however some media players have different sets of video codecs - methods of compression using computer algorithms - and so the hex-edited video can look entirely different. This lends to my choice of using Windows Media Player's interpretation over PotPlayer's. As Adrian Mackenzie says in the reading: "Codecs catalyze new relations between people, things, spaces, and times in events and forms" (Briz). The focus of mind in a jam is not how representational is it, but rather how the viewer wants to interpret it; through their unique set of experiences, relationships, and behaviour, new meaning can be instilled into the work - this is the codec of the real world.

I wanted the name of the work to be ambiguous as well. This is a representation of a mind in a traffic jam, but it has the potential to extend to the portrayal of a mind jam if it were to manifest itself.

Reading:

Nick Briz. "GLITCH CODEC TUTORIAL." GLITCH CODEC TUTORIAL. N.p., 2010. Web. 24 Oct. 2016. <http://nickbriz.com/glitchcodectutorial>.

I wanted to add some more colour to the work. Using Audacity to import the raw video data brought some more interesting effects with noise and and jitteriness, but not so much with the colours. I tried with both AVI and MP4 formats and they just didn't do it for me. It did work for some nice glitch art with photo stills though.

Next I went with hex editing, back to Frhed Hex Editor. I went and replaced all instances of "no" with "go" and the results were similar to what I had in my experiments: just a slow meltdown that makes it hard for Potplayer and VLC Player to digest.

Then I had an idea: what about Windows Media Player, the old-as-time video player bundled with Windows which I had left for more customizable players? Playing the video with its different codec settings brought so much colour and noise that it was clearly the winner. An issue I had with the player is that it did not allow a full-resolution screenshot, so I settled with a PrtScn of the frame.

Artist statement to follow.

I've settled with a basic idea for Project 2. Using some prerecorded footage I wanted to try the Overlay effect again from this datamoshing tutorial. Essentially it involves combining two video clips into one by keeping a single I-frame at the start and removing the rest throughout the clip. From what I learned, I-frames are like key frames, and the other type, P-frames, are the in-between frames. So after removing the rest of the I-frames we are left with only P-frames, and the blending effect follows.

Both clips are from the same street and highway entrance/exit, but the notable difference is day and night. I wanted to see how the clips blend together and then got some interesting visuals. The audio is nothing special though, just cars humming by.

The quality after upload is really terrible, so here is a Google Drive link for a more HD version: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1w16GJvor0SQUd0U2IxTFpZbXc/view?usp=sharing

It looks wicked, really. However, the process is time-consuming. I needed to convert the MP4 to an uncompressed AVI format, then after removing the I-frames, convert it back to MP4 so it is a more portable and viewable format; with a high resolution of 1440p, it's not hard to imagine how tedious it is. In the future, I would clip the videos so they are more manageable.

It would be cool to do a day-and-night like here, experimenting with sunrise and sunset. If time permits that's worth looking into. Otherwise using footage from different types of roads should provide enough difference to create the overlay effect. There's also the bloom effect mentioned in the tutorial, I'll play around with that next. So many factors to experiment with!

Have You Uploaded To The Cloud Yet?

Graphic GIF

When I think of digital graphics, the presence of pixels surfaces as one of the fundamental foundations for modern images. In the beginning, when screen could only show so much data, the proper placement of pixels is crucial to displaying information in a clear and compact way.

At first I wanted to try rotoscope, but then I decided to take a more simplified route: instead of creating intricate digitally-drawn lines, I went with creating distinctly more pixellated forms.

The theme of cloud computing was formed after I completed my co-op term in Toronto, so I made my focus on the emergence of modern technology. Using an image of the CN Tower as a centrepiece, I enhanced the colours and contrast to bring out a more HD appearance. Then I added cloud created from scratch and blew them up while still maintaining their blockiness.

In response to the reading, "GIFS are simultaneously “in your face” and in your mind, their affects continuous with the immersive experience of daily internet use" (McKay). The resulting GIF not only pops, and it is meant to remind us of how technology is essential to our day-to-day lives, mainly storing our personal files to "the cloud". The world of pixels and data are synonymous with the tangible cities we live and work in. Finally, the title is capitalized in a way that references generated web articles that offer technical pro-tips such as Lifehacker which somehow end up on the first page of Google; it tries to persuade Internet browsers to click on these pages and read, even if the article may just be a stub with a link or two.


Reading:
McKay, Sally. "The Affect of Animated GIFs (Tom Moody, Petra Cortright, Lorna Mills) | Art & Education." Art & Education. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Sept. 2016. <http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/the-affect-of-animated-gifs-tom-moody-petra-cortright-lorna-mills/>.

Image used in GIF-making process:
Felisiris. CN Tower. Digital image. Pixabay. N.p., Apr. 2016. Web. 26 Sept. 2016. <https://pixabay.com/en/tower-blue-sky-toronto-canada-high-1306564>.

Lurk

Narrative GIF

This is a hybrid of the known and the unknown. We see a common scene at a live music performance, but no faces are familiar. We see an entity that is iconic and memorable, but in a manner that reverts it back to any ordinary monster horror.

I used footage from a concert I attended and wanted to focus on the musicians. However, the presence of the audience member beside me seemed to be full of energy. The more I watched the movie the more I agreed on using him as the subject as he serves to be an interesting focus. Adobe Photoshop made it incredibly easy to create a composition and crop the rest of the video.

I wanted to show how the presence of music can bring out our most inner emotions, but the hard part was figuring out how to incorporate a narrative into it. I played around with some blending modes on various colour layers, and settled on red due to how its stark heat contrasts with the regular blue hue. I made the red layers visible on only when the stage light fills the screen, and that was when I thought of the idea to make something appear in its intensity.

What if we were able to see a vision of this person's true colours? I chose to go with something gruesome, as though we were watching a horror movie emerging from the seemingly comforting scene at a concert. The idea of placing H. R. Giger's Alien design - one that is simultaneously terrifying and mesmerising - in the centre of this little story excited me.

At that point, it finally came together. Whether the monster seen in the GIF is figurative or literal, it provided an ominous layer to the narrative which gives plenty to speculate about.

In response to the reading, "[t]he goal of the animated GIF ... is to employ as few frames as possible, in order to keep the file size small and the download times speedy" (McKay). My narrative GIF tries to find a balance between the jerkiness of GIF frames and the smoothness of cinematic footage. If the video was completely imported into Photoshop, it would result in a more seamless sequence but at the cost of a smaller and more manageable file size. I opted to remove just enough frames so that the monster's appearance is limited to one frame at a time. The original video was at 1080p resolution, but I chose to shrink the GIF to 640 x 360 pixels to further shrink the file.


Reading:
McKay, Sally. "The Affect of Animated GIFs (Tom Moody, Petra Cortright, Lorna Mills) | Art & Education." Art & Education. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Sept. 2016. <http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/the-affect-of-animated-gifs-tom-moody-petra-cortright-lorna-mills/>.

Image used in GIF-making process:
Rydzewski, Artur. Alien, H.R. Giger. Digital image. Flickr. N.p., 13 Apr. 2014. Web. 21 Sept. 2016. <https://www.flickr.com/photos/119200904@N07/14102287852>.