In case you didn't know, pixelpusher (evan.raskob) is a live video performance artist, or "pixelist" based in London, UK. Click the Info button above for hiring and contact info.
I’m pleased to say that my performance piece, ICE_SNAKE==NOISE will be adapted into an interactive audio-visual installation for Unleashed Devices at Watermans Gallery from 1 September to 22 October 2010.
After a few years of adding visual flair to the sonic cacephony of countless (nearly) NOISE==NOISE nights across London, I finally jumped into the thick of it and created my own audio-visual performance piece.
ICE SNAKE==NOISE slithered up out of a dark period of my life. Literally, it was dark: the dead cold of winter in England, depressing December, where sunny days are a far off memory chewed up and spat out by a biting, inescapable cold. I had a clear goal – to take the frustration and cold anger of a winter away from loved ones and bring that energy into a dramatic performance, at once sonically powerful but also textured and ever-changing, wriggling, like a true snake.
Ryan Jordan, the maestro of audiovisual vertigo who organizes NOISE==NOISE, asked me to perform in Ipswitch, and as I wasn’t going anywhere for the December holidays I agreed. With little time to prepare, I hashed together bits of pieces I was working on using 3D drawing of wormlike, slithering shapes in Fluxus, and lashed them to a soundtrack of chaotic distortion using SuperCollider (for the first time). For the texture of the snake, I used photos of these lattice-like networks of ice, frozen to the roof of our Dalston studio overnight before the winter sun’s moderate warmth blunted their edges, into shapeless, gray slugs.
I’m very pleased with the result – performing it is like taming a wild beast, you don’t control it as much as ride it through until you both tire out and surrender.
For this installation, I invite others to experience the piece by performing it themselves. Put on the headphones and imagine yourself in the dead of winter in the ancient countryside, the howling wind slashing at your skin, piercing spikes of cold penetrating your bare flesh under your clothes, the swirling snow dizzying your mind until all grows numb and silent.
Here is a live recording of myself playing it back in December:
Drawn together is an interactive installation project, exploring creative crowd sourcing in hand drawn music videos. It allows groups of individuals to create a music video by asking each of them to visually interpret small sections of music, and combining their work. This particular video came from the collaborative results of about 80 people drawing 211 individual drawings (frames of animation) that each interpreted a frame of audio (at 12 frames per second, that comes to 66 milliseconds).
That’s roughly half the frames we needed to make s smooth video, so the result is pretty jerky, but I thought it was interesting to show it as a work in progress. I could have filled in the rest of the frames myself, or with my friends, but I chose not to because that would destroy the spirit of the whole project. Instead, I will show this again in Brixton in early September where we will finish the video completely with another crowd.
My first impression of all the participants was how seriously they took this project! Some of my skeptical colleagues predicted that, at a festival, many people would be all loosened up and draw anything from Jackson Pollack-infused doodles to a variety of softcore porn and low-quality graffiti. Well, the results are in and only one phallus appeared, and that was from one of our neighbors in the next tent with my permission (*someone* had to draw the first one).
Our tent neightbor, Sabrepulse, from the 8-bit radio show One Life Left, interprets, uh, dragons
The rest of the people thoughtfully bit their lip and produced a variety of sometimes abstract, sometimes representational, sometimes intricate drawings that represented the short, abstract sound looping through their headphones. A few of them put on the headphones and looked at me with questioning eyes – “I think it’s broken? There’s only this crunching sound.” Then, after listening thoughtfully, they went to work on it and produced a surprising number of pictures, like the bicycle by a country road (above).
What did we learn from this?
First, that next time I show this, I will have people sit in an “isolation booth” (which was the original idea, changed for budgetary and time-related reasons) so they are more free to doodle whatever comes into their minds. Drawing is not a social act, it is something very personal, and the headphones and looping sound make it even more so. It also takes time, and I didn’t want people to feel rushed.
Which brings me to lesson #2 – this takes a lot more time per person than I estimated. I figured, from my personal tests, that people would get into the flow of it and knock out a few frames each in a few minutes. I didn’t count on 1) having to explain it individually to 80 people and convince them it was well worth their time instead of watching Thom Yorke or hitting the Money Shoulder treehouse bar, and 2) that people would take so much time drawing extremely detailed, intricate drawing such as man-eating dinosaurs and what appeared to be a realistic rendering of the burning bush that spoke to Moses back in biblical days.
Regarding #1, I misjudged festival crowds – my experience with installations is that people go in a steady stream, but our tents (and the stuttering schedules for bands and events) produced clumps of people at odd intervals. Plus, I had to use my second computer for BulletTime (see below) so the economy of scale possible with this project was reduced to a single choke-point. No problem, that’s what the first test run is for!
With #2, I was really inspired by what I observed. This proved that simple black and white line drawings, with minimal brushes, could not only be expressive for a wide range of people (kids to parents to general revelers), but also be so immersive as to drown out a blaring, midday festival, and hold their attention for up to 15 minutes in some cases. After seeing the project with real participants, I can think of all sorts of ways to improve it, including activating the “onion-skin” mode where people can actually see the frame drawn before theirs, and the animation isn’t random but sequential starting from the beginning of the song. I would have loved to have tried this, except for lack of time and equipment. Will definitely revisit this at a future date.
Bullet Time
My two (now former) students from Digital Screen Arts at UCA Farnham, Benjamin Burdock and Christopher Belcher, came to me a little over a year ago with a crazy idea about creating a portable rig for shooting Matrix-like Bullet-time movies on the cheap. After a solid year of hard blood, sweat, steel fabrication, and coding, they finished it in time for Glastonbury. The Big Chill was the first time I got to see it in action, after some email-enabled coding and debugging sessions with Ben. The very talented Dave Morgan (another UCA grad) replaced Ben for this trip.
The result was well worth it. Bullet Time drew a good crowd every day, especially at night when we invited people to do acrobatics inside the all-seeing arc of Xbox cameras, frozen into a movie of all the cameras capturing in sequence, spinning around them like budding Neos dodging digital bullets, and rear-projected the result instantly on the side of the tent for passers-by to see.
I also learned a lot in the process, especially about how difficult and unpredictable it is to run 30 USB web cams off of 2 computers, be they shiny new MacBook pros, PCs, or Mac towers. (Test results say you can only run 6 cameras per USB hub per USB bus, for a max of 12 per laptop, in case you are crying out for an answer).
Other Highlights
MadLab (Manchester Digital Lab) and their robot building/racing exhibition; Olly Venning and his stop-frame animation workshop (and my tent-mate); and finally Tristan Brady-Jacobs and his gang doing long-exposure photography, and helped perform using a long-exposure inspired Processing sketch during Nick Rothwell’s set:
Thanks to Julia Dempsey for organizing The Swap Meet (the overall area of the festival which we were a part of) and Lewis Sykes for organizing the Cybersonica camp.
Drawn Together allows groups of individuals to create a music video by asking each of them to visually interpret small sections of music, and combining their work.
This particular video came from the collaborative results of about 80 people drawing 211 individual drawings (frames of animation) that each interpreted a frame of audio (at 12 frames per second, that comes to 66 milliseconds).
The experience begins with a piece of music broken into short sections, be that a slice of a drum break or a sliver of a synth warble. Individuals are given a black screen, a digital drawing tool and a looping, random section of the music. They are encouraged to draw their own visual interpretation of that sound. Once satisfied with their handiwork, the drawing is saved, linked to the sound it represents and becomes a small section of the music video. When all the sound clips have a visual representation linked to them, the video is shown.
Like the early 20th Century animator Oscar Fischinger, participants are encouraged to draw in black-and-white line drawings, giving them a free range of expression within strict stylistic constraints.
Drawn Together builds on ideas of collective consciousness and puts a modern spin on the Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse – where artists would draw body parts and conceal them under folds of paper, before passing it to the next person to add to the mystery figure.
Like in Exquisite Corpse, participants in Drawn Together do not get to see the video until it is entirely complete. Cards are handed out with details of how they can see it online, or in a private viewing.
A Bit More:
At the same time, Drawn Together is a completely Open Source production (developed in Processing, graphics created in Inkscape) and the source code will be available after The Big Chill on this website.
Additionally, Drawn Together explores the idea of factory production in art by dividing up an artistic task (e.g. creating a music video) between a collection of anonymous, interchangeable strangers. The result is uncertain – is it stronger or more interesting than a conceptually coherent work by a single author? Is it more interesting because of its complexity? Or is the result something different, entirely? Answering these questions requires us to use the software and judge the results.
The medium of production, e.g. the Open source software, constrains the artistic possibilities of the images (black and white, with limited ability to create complex shapes). Yet, the Open source license of the software allows anyone to create a derivative version with more visual possibilities built in. The trade-off to this approach is that the more specialization and complexity are built into the visual tools for the software, the more the participants are constrained to the software’s authors’ version of visual possibility, resulting in a production model more like a traditional factory where the creative power is in the hands of those who design the system, not those who carry it out.
Contact:
If you’d like more information on Drawn Together, or to show it or other pixelpusher projects, or to schedule an interview with the artist Evan Raskob, please contact pixelpusher at info@pixelist.info.
Sorry about canceling that last show at the last minute. There was a big opening at the [tag]Pace Wildenstein[/tag] gallery in New York City for a show I’d been working on for a few years, under the artist [tag]Robert Whitman[/tag]. Read on for video and more…
