Watercolour & Video

And here's another experiment. I tried combining one of my latest experiments with some footage I had taken a few years ago (once I get a video camera, I can do this more effectively by having more appropriate footage, but this will do for now). I liked the last bit of the experiment, when the watercolours are much more generated, however the initial parts are quite weak. I also want to be able to incorporate the watercolours with the video in a much more subtle manner, rather than just overlaying them over the clips.

Manovich - The practice of everyday media life

Today I read the essay 'The practice of everyday media life' by Lev Manovich, suggested by my tutor, and I took some notes along the way.

"But in the area of consumer economy, the changes have been quite substantial. Strategies and tactics are now often closely linked in an interactive relationship, and often their features are reversed." (Manovich, 2008)


I must say that I have to disagree with how Manovich discribes that 'strategies' and 'tactics' are overlapping one another and are sometimes reversed. Unless the user can code, I think it is quite impossible for him/her to really cross the barrier from tactic to strategies. If anything, a company makes the user THINK they can cross that barrier, but generally they are still within the limits that the designers and developers set.

A user can buy a blog template, change colours, find background images, move the sidebars etc... but always has to abide by the limits set by the template designer/ developer. To truly be able to set a strategy and completely change the web template, a user has to be a developer. They must know html, Javascript etc... they must know how to hack the design. In the same way, a user needs to have some design skills to create an eye-catching colour scheme, background and header.

In order for the user to be able to truly recreate the strategy – they have to be a designer and/or developer themselves.


"In short, while modern artists have so far successfully met the challenges of each generation of media technologies, can professional art survive extreme democratization of media production and access?"


Let's say everyone gives up on art – what will happen? We will be continuously squeezing every last drop of overly reconstructed art – over and over again – until we have nothing, or more of the same thing. The average user can only do so much with 'remixed' art. Yes in this modern day, 'remixing' is in, but for how long are we going to be revisiting elements which have already been created. I think giving up on art just because it is being copied and reused everywhere all the time does not makes sense at all. Most of the time, when this happens, it is free advertising for the artist, and this is never a bad thing.


"While the typical diary video or anime on YouTube may not be that special, enough are. In fact, in all media where the technologies of productions were democratized (video, music, animation, graphic design, etc.), I have came across many projects which not only rival those produced by most well-known commercial companies and most well-known artists but also often explore the new areas not yet touched by those with lots of symbolic capital." (Manovich, 2008)

Most of the time these projects that Manovich mentions are created by artists and designers, albeit not commercial or popular ones. Rarely are they created by someone who isn't the least bit creative (I say creative because I'm not looking at art as visuals, but also as a narrative piece, sound, etc...) So I think the question is not 'is art still possible?' but 'how is art evolving?' Perhaps the bourgeoise art is coming to and end, whilst artists who are not so well-known are rising because of the quality of their art, and not because of who their parents are, or what museum they afford to exhibit in. This is, needless to say, a good thing.


One of the questions our tutor put on the wiki was : How do you respond to Manovich’s final statement, ‘ The real challenge may lie in the dynamics of Web 2.0 culture – its constant innovation, its energy, and its unpredictability.’?

I don’t think this is a challenge at all – to me this is a breath of fresh air, and for most artists, who do not want to enclose themselves within an unchanging environment, innovation, energy and unpredictability is brought by other developers and designers anyway, so rather than seeing it as a challenge, we see it as an opportunity. Well, at least I do.

Updates

What's Happening?

Ok, I'm a bit stuck at the moment, but let me try and put my thoughts here on the blog. This week I've tried to work on my flowchart and my storyboarding. I've been trying to put this off because it's a scary process... essentially its visualising how the project will look like. Processing is moving slow and although the visuals are taking shape, I'm trying to stay focused on what the project is about, before going out of point.

Discussions

During the chats we've been talking about Web2.0, or the end of Web2.0 - art after Web2.0, open-source environments, the connected, seamless digital works. This got me thinking about my project. I think it is extremely important that my project focuses on the interactivity as well as the experience. We are in a time where everyone is a creator, everyone can be famous, everyone can be an artist. Everyone wants everything to be about them, so it is important that my interactive experience puts the user at the centre of this experience, and makes them feel important.

Flowchart / Storyboard

I've been brainstorming some ideas for filming. I will be filming in the summer, and in september I will start combining the film with visuals. So far the structure of the idea is this:

Structure part one: Norm
The visuals start off calm, perhaps a little bit confusing. I was thinking of having a series of calming shots like the sea moving. After these shots, the viewer finds him/herself sitting at a dinner table where everyone is looking at them. There is a final sound of a fork hitting a plate, as if everyone has just stopped eating and looked at the viewer. I would like to have a few shots of people eating and food. People eating at a dinner table symbolise a very strange experience for me. Essentially it's a couple of human bodies paying to put 'object's in a hole in their face. I would love to bring this sort of strangeness in the shots, or perhaps just a bit of disgust. Disgust is very real, and at this point, reality is what's important in the project.

Structure part two: Interaction
At one point, the person opposite the viewer on the dining table says something like, "Well, what are you waiting for? Do something." This will trigger the interactive process. Since I live in Malta, I would like to have the people in the film speaking Maltese and then have English subtitles. Although this will only happen once or twice.

Structure part three: Reality
The viewer can then 'click' or 'touch' any of the people at the dining table and this will take them to another video. The videos will be shots of everyday life which tend to make us feel uncomfortable, reflective, frustrated... such as a full, busy shop, looking at someone right in the face, trying to draw something but nothing comes out (this stage needs to evolve - I need to brainstorm and research more). The viewer always has a way out of these uncomfortable situations, they can click 'somewhere' and escape to another video. [I still need to see whether the videos here will be linear / random. Osiris suggested a program called 'Soft Cinema' which generates a series of random visuals which I need to look into for ideas.]

Structure part four: Surreality
Eventually the viewer starts seeing visuals in the films. The viewer can interact with these visuals, touch them, (perhaps they change colour, move, enlarge, duplicate). The more the viewer interacts with the visuals, the more intense they become. Audio is introduced at this point. [This part of the structure is still not clear to me, I need to look into it and elaborate on what exactly happens to the visuals, what sort of video is showing in the background) The goal is however, to amuse the viewer and to let them know in a very subtle manner that the more they play with the visuals, the more intense they get.

Structure part five: Frustration
I'm still unclear of what will happen here, but my idea at the moment is that the visuals and audio become so intense that they become intolerable. I want the audio to be loud, distorted, the visuals to be jumpy, pixelated. This is the climax of the experience. I'm not sure whether I should provide the viewer with a way out, or just leave them here. So far, this is the end but it might change.


I will be getting a video camera around May, where I can start taking some test shots, which I can then combine with visuals to start getting a feel of the final project. Until that time, I will continue to read, process, experiment with colour & after effects, and of course update my structure.

Digitised Watercolour II

Another digitised watercolour experiment; this time I deliberately went a bit too far. Although I still prefer my previous experiment, I liked what happened to the lines. The rest of the week will be dedicated to Processing - hopefully finishing Chapter 6.

Processing Week

Working with lines - the more I work with Processing the more it's clear that code art is all about experimentation and happy accidents. For amateur programmers like myself especially, I think it's quite difficult to plan something and try and code it - but experimentation in the code can actually produce some interesting visuals.

Multisensory & Multimedia (Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge)

"At the seashore, between the land of atoms and the sea of bits, we must reconcile our dual citizenships in the physical and digital worlds. Our windows to the digital world have been confined to flat rectangular screens and pixels --"painted bits." But while our visual senses are steeped in the sea of digital information, our bodies remain in the physical world. "Tangible bits" give physical form to digital information, making bits directly manipulable and perceptible."
Hiroshi Ishii

(Taken from Multisensory & Multimedia (Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge))

I'm stepping away from the interactive projector idea and thinking about surfaces for now. Beyond the rectangle. Textures, tactile qualities; touch.

Experiment with solid watercolour

I'm really happy with how this experiment turned out. When I drew the watercolour this time I left the colours pretty solid rather than watering them down too much. This was scanned and the composition was split into 5 pieces using the pen tool in photoshop (but leaving the original underneath). I then used distortion in after effects on every separate piece so that I could control them individually. I went overboard with the effects mainly the complexity / amount and evolution of the effect to start getting the little pixels out.. they remind me of satellite pictures. The result is very similar to how one would see colour on drugs - which is why I think I'm beginning to make some steps forward...