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Mar 02.2010
Just wanted to make an proud announcement of a new member of my family of trusted work tools. It’s a portable recorder which records up to 96bits in stereo. Here’s a picture, and what follows is a kind of funny little story:
I bought this unit because the sound on all of the portable cameras that I use is horrible! It becomes a problem when you are planning to use the sound. And I’ve just begun a new project which I’m doing in supermarkets… so the story is I was doing my thing in a supermarket. Pulled out my camera, my gorilla tripod and screwed it onto this Sony unit. Then started to do an odd recording. Before long I noticed people with walkie-talkies giving me odd side-glances and speaking secretly to what I guessed was security. When I was finished one of them came up to me and asked if everything was ok, but he did so in such a threatening way. I actually started to involuntarily shake a little bit. I showed him that clearly this was a recorder, with microphones, and that it said Sony! I can only assume he thought it was some kind of explosive device!
Anyway, it was pretty exciting. I look forward to more such experiences. Maybe the next I’ll get on camera.
Mar 01.2010
Just got a google alert for an article published on Communication Arts on my website, theturn.tv. There’s an interview with Aer Visual Studio as well. (Not me though, why not? hmmm...)
Anyway, you can see it here if you’re interested.
Communication Arts - theturn.tv
Feb 13.2010
I had been walking with my friend Kelli… or maybe it started out with Hector actually… Anyway, we were in some dusty, strange city and neither of us knew anyone. A young dude was walking behind us at one point and he was putting bullets into a gun. Kelli (or Hector) kind of freaked a bit. My first instinct was to stay calm, but obviously that was the wrong one because soon enough he was cocking the gun and me and Kelli (I think at this point it was indeed Hector) were on the run. We tried to cut down strange places where he wouldn’t find us and ended up climbing through some city wilderness which was mostly a bunch of dusty weeds, some overgrown ivy. But soon enough, after we felt we’d lost him, we found the theatre… It was pretty dark, like a cave lit from within by moonlight, even though the only opening was through the front entrance. That opening was massive and roundish… this is what made it seem like a cave - the entrance was quite irregular and wild. Inside the space was large and multi-tiered. There were girls so fair they almost seemed like albinos, and they were staging a ritual. It was amazing, magnetic, silent, soft, potent. I felt so happy to have found it, and yet now they were telling me that I had to leave because this ritual was only for girls. I figured that has to be just a ridiculous thing they say to weed out the tourists. I’m not a tourist! And then I noticed there was at least one other young man there. He was doing some construction work, doing some painting or something…
Anyway, we left the theatre, and walked around the neighborhood, which was an odd mix of corporate rococo. Many buildings that were nearly identical, and yet each completely different. The buildings had massive, organic structures, they all looked like massive shells or tree limbs, but made out of smooth concrete with a shiny, almost opalescent surface!
Later we returned to the theatre and they had painted it’s interior, and it seemed a lot smaller, more limited. The construction/painter dude had done just a dreadful job. One wall was burgundy, another had some unimaginative mural which was quite forgettable. I was very saddened by this, but still felt the magical influence of the theatre we’d visited the night before with it’s mist and depth and ritual power.
Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival!Jan 30.2010
Hello there, all!
I have a happy announcement… I will have 70 full minutes of my videos exhibited in the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival! I’m really so proud to be a part of this amazing festival in France. I wish with all of my heart that I could be there as well, and I was invited to attend, and had planned on going as well, but fate ruled against it! But anyway, I’m very very grateful to them for showing so many of my works and invite everyone to check out this amazing festival!
Here’s where you can look at the cool program of the festival and find any information you require. The festival started yesterday and will continue through the the 6th of February!
Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival!
Jan 18.2010
Well, I keep practicing and practicing with my voice improvisations. Actually, I don’t really think of it as practice, because it tends to be very creative and I often feel like I’m reaching into someplace strange and special. But I worry about bringing this to the ears of the public. I’m just not sure about the repetitiveness! By it’s very nature, voice-looping improvisations are repetitious. And there’s something very beautiful to me indeed in the strengthening of a single voice by it’s nearly identical, but ultimately different brothers. I like how the voice seems to be come almost mythologized by the doubling, triple-ing, quadruple-ing!… Each repetition of the voice brings it into a place that makes me feel so mystified. It reminds me of the faces I used to doodle all the time at school - they never had eye pupils. To me, adding the eye pupil brought an identity that weakened the image. I preferred these eyes to be anyones. And for me I get that same feeling when I double my own voice. It’s what I was drawn to in my Turn ghost cluster experiment as well.
Anyway, still I’m left wondering if these recordings will be interesting to anyone else!