neonascent

Gateway - 2005

Mid-february 2005 I returned from a working trip to Holland, where I had been working on a 3-month IT contract. All this exercise of the left hemisphere, as well as the experience of being around nerds for months, had left me in an odd head-space that obliged me to make this art.

Gateway is a 50cm x 50cm fantasy landscape featuring Z-guage figures of people and cows. It can be reasonably described as a chintzy engagement with a metaphore for the internet / virtual reality; The tiny figures approach and stare in awe at a huge silver metalic, flashing, phalic tower which thrusts out of the earth - Go Go new technology!

Surveillance - 2005

Having gotten Gateway out of my system, I set about producing something a little more substantial and edifying. Surveillance was my first relatively mature video-piece, and uses captured and manipulated stills of Gateway. Surveillance is stylistically and thematically inspired by the admittedly quite clichéd Cyberpunk genre (images relating to neural-networks, etc), but also is the progeny of our contemporary “War-against-Terror” governement policies. There is a dab of humour in it too.

Those interested can view a reduced-quality version of the video (1.26mb).

I guess I should disclaim that neither of these artworks was really intended to further the Great Artistic Discourse, and were mainly giving me the opportunity to experiment with various media and themes. However, I think Surveillance managed to subvert the originally naive kitch of Gateway.

• Link to Gateway Flickr set
• Link to Surveillance video

Last year I created an interactive installation using a wooden sphere as the interface through a to a piece of custom-programmed software. Since then it has been renamed from Panarbocon to Natural Experience, and exhibited as part of Elastic 2005; 3rd Annual Emerging Art and Design Award.

Here finally is a 744kb clip of the view through Natural Experience (WMV format can be played on Macs using the VLC player), as someone uses the wooden sphere. Interacting with the sphere allows you to “look” 360° around the forrest panorama. The clip is pretty short, and does not rotate more than a few degrees, but it can allow you a better impression of what the experience of using it is like.

• Link to video clip

I’m in the process of blogging descriptions of a few of my older artworks, for the sake of completeness and a sense of progression. This is the first, there are more to come which will be similarly titled…

Unattached - 2004

This work was exhibited as what appeared to be a normal, unplugged telephone on a plinth. The quick dial buttons had labels such as “The Queen”, “Elvis”, and “Mum” thanks to a friend, and many people at the exhibition thought that that was all there was to it.

There was in fact more going on, and those who jokingly lifted the receiver to their ear and said hello, or those who had seen others using it and tried it themselves found that there was a conversation going on over the phone. True to an aim at sincere and truthful artwork, I had rung up girls that I liked, and recorded the conversation as I asked them out. The result was that I had about 10 minutes of recorded conversation of getting rejected. :S These conversations were burned onto a CD, and played through a discman connected to a homebuilt short-distance FM transmitter, to be picked up a radio wired into the apparently disconnected telephone (The radio power was patched through the phone so that the radio was only on while the phone was “off the hook”).

The willful masochism of ringing these girls and getting rejected was one of the most draining experiences I can remember!

I’m sure many of you have seen this already, but as I’ve found lots of friends hadn’t; here you go.

Jeff Han of New York University has develped as touch screen that can detect multiple touches at the same time. Not impressed? Take a look at the video: this allows for an inspiringly intuative new breed of user interface, with example applications allowing Minority Report style interaction.

The system uses FTIR (frustrated total internal reflection) of side lighting, and when one touches the screen this light is scattered away from the finger, and picked up by a camera underneath.

via Boing Boing:

A new suite of free and open tools let you watch TV, make TV, and recommend TV in a way that’s easier, cheaper and more accessible than ever before.

A pakage like the Democracy suite was inevitable - combining the technologies of RSS (syndication/subscription), BitTorrent (scalable distribution), and VLC (multi-format, multi-platform video player) to form an essential tool for the new internet-based grassroots video distribution model.

Democracy has just been released as beta for PC, with a Mac version already released and Linux on the way. It seems well-suited to take its place as an ubiquitous technology to replace conventional TV.

The experience of Democracy is great. Fire it up, pick some channels, and leave it running. Flip to it whenever you want to watch your video — it’s as easy as turning on a TV…

I’m sure those of you who pay an interest to this blog will know that my colleagues and I are working on an epidsodal, free-range video narrative called Carrie & Vostok (more information through its dedicated site). Essentially it brings the stylistic diversity of the world’s budding video poducers/artists together in a conceptually coherent narrative about two characters - capturing the postmodern nature of different gazes apon any scenario. I don’t really need to explain how Democracy has arrived at the perfect time to fit the needs of this project. Serendipity or providence?

• Link to Democracy website

Monochrom has just blogged regarding the burying of a Lancet Report on Iraqi death toll. The report seems to be methodologically sound, and based on their findings they conservative conclude that most Iraqi deaths are from US “operations” rather than insurgent/”terrorist” activities.

It’s definitely worth at least a quick scan in order to understand the politics and get an idea of how reasonable the claim seems to be. I’m sure most are aware that the Lancet is one of the oldest and most respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, and does not okay material lightly.

Unfortunetly, the Z Commentary Online article loses some of its authority with the following:

Their most significant finding was that the vast majority (79 percent) of violent deaths were caused by “coalition” forces using “helicopter gunships, rockets or other forms of aerial weaponry,”

So far so good…

and that almost half (48 percent) of these were children, with a median age of 8.

(my emphasis) Now, reading further on we find that their definition set for children is under 15. As median is the central value in a range this is tautological, and presumably masquerades for “average age of 8″ to give the article and report a little more emotional impact. Of course it is quite possible the average age is much lower, but from here there is no way for us to know either way.

Regardless, this does not effect the actual and weighty conclusions of the Lancet report.

• Link to Z Commentary Online: Burying The Lancet Report

Shanghai Street Artspace 2006 features an “anthropological investigation and disciplined scrutiny into the subversive street fashion of local teenagers” in the form of an exhibition of local cosplay.

Interesting. I’m playing particular attention to this sort of buzz, at the threshhold of a similar Syndey-centric, photographic subculture exposition project. More about this later, but for now it’ll be enough to point out the necessity of holding a good launch, with lots of the models involved…

• Link to Exhibition Images

I don’t want to sound too geeky, but this is a post on the theme of graphic narratives, as opposed to “cartoons”. Naming anything a cartoon or comic really tends to beg the question of affective intent of the content.

I recently discovered “Oh no Robot”; a search engine that searches through the drawn text in graphic narratives. This in itself is fantastically amusing, often surprising, and useful.

After a few indescriminate searches, I managed to stumble apon Whispered Apologies. Whispered Apologies…

…is a collaborative comic strip! You design a comic, pictures but no words, and send it in. Then Ryan and Joey and friends will add dialogue and narration to make your comic illustrative of wacky adventures or even quiet moments of reflection and self-awareness. The process is explained here. The result is a new comic, full of excitement and love!

A good number of the narratives are zany and amusing, and there are a few that are deeply moving - I suggest you check it out.

As an aside; disconnectedness of drawing from writing produced the very weird stories of cult classic childrens’ program The Magic Roundabout. Animation was produced in France, and dubbing into English was done without the original script!

• Link to Oh no robots searchengine
• Link to Whispered Apologies

I’ve just migrated to a brand new, cheap, fast Aussie server. The company is MD Web hosting, and they are very reasonably priced and have a full compliment of useful tools and features. Compared to the hosting that came with my Namesecure domain names, this is like being in a candy store. Here’s some immediate improvements:

• I’ve now got plenty of subdomains to play with. I’ve set up the following:
  • blog.neonascent.net - goes to my blog
  • it.neonascent.net - goes to my IT consulting page
  • carrievostok.neonascent.net - goes to the carrie and vostok site
• Addon domains lets me serve more than one completely independant site from the same space:
  • neonascent.net - Blog, IT consulting, online gallery, misc.
  • dirtysuzie.net - Site for an art project I’m working on
• I’ve got true domain parking, instead of the useless web forwarding namesecure was giving:
  • muchmojo.com, neonascent.com and neonascent.org - go to neonascent.net
  • dirtysuzie.com - goes to dirtysuzie.net

If you notice any problems with the site, please shout out! (Webmaster AT neonascent DOT net) Thankyou!

No, I haven’t forgotten about Carrie and Vostok. Emma points out that the design is too clinical, and I should probably find them their own domain while updating it…

We are also going to try for Australian Film Commision’s Industry and Cultural Developement Funding.

Now here is a rough runthrough of what we covered in a recent brainstorm:

specifcation:

• episoidal
• not too specific
• timely.

background:

• live in a major city.
• red for Vostok, yellow for Carrie
• who are these people? what do they do? leave nice and loose for the time being…

It was decided that the action will happen in weeks instead of months. This gives less confusion about how it ties into real world time. Here are the rough outlines for the first four weeks.

Week one
Monday: Vostok finds carrie a home
Tuesday: vostok throws his toothbrush out.
Wednesday: carrie has her period
Thursday: they go shopping
Friday: vostok stinks out the toilet
Saturday: carrie and vostok kill hundreds of cockroaches
Sunday: carrie brings a date home

Week two
Monday: vostok considers something deelply profound.
Tuesday: carrie has a phone conversation.
Wednesday: vostok has a phone conversation.
Thursday: vostok cleans a fridge.
Friday: carrie reads the paper.
Saturday: carrie buys a bra.
Sunday: vostok take out the garbage.

Week three:
Monday: carrie and vostok dinner.
Tuesday: a coin is glued to the ground.
Wednesday: chocolate is eaten.
Thursday: the coffee is spilt
Friday: they dance
Saturday: carrie looses a sock.
Sunday: vostok stubs his toe.

Week four:
Monday: vostok cries
Tuesday: carrie gets a brazilian.
Wednesday: a light bulb goes out.
Thursday: an alarm goes off.
Friday: carrie falls…
Saturday: vostok hails a cab.
Sunday: something burns.

tech: calendar, forum, torrent tracker, domain, ipod video.

need: epidisodes, how-to documentation (eg how to put it into digital form + tips, hints, and guidance).