Hey GI!

I've been working on Glasgow International festival's viral video team this week going to exhibition launches and parties to capture the atmosphere in short video clips. They specifically asked us to use basic equipment and make our clips quite candid, guerilla style.

It's been a good way to get around the festival and has meant that I've seen a lot of exhibitions that wouldn't have necessarily interested me otherwise - some of them still don't!

The high profile works, Jim Lambie, Catherine Yass, Wilhelm Sasnal, etc, were the ones which have grabbed all the press attention but I really wasn't convinced by Sasnal's piece. The idea was good and very provocative but it just didn't really seem like an interesting final piece.

Ceryth Wym Evans piece at The Local, however, really got me going. It's a film projected onto 3 mirror balls positioned so that every now and then there's an 'eclipse' and people are suddenly aware of the darkness which then draws them into the piece more. The Local isn't set up like a gallery space, it's a bar with art. The art isn't obvious so when Evans piece draws you in you then start to notice the other works around it and to me that's much more interesting.

FireBox Rehearsal

I had the dancers in the studio for a few hours today working on some new material for a film we've been asked to be involved in (more on that next time) but I took the opportunity to try out working with lights and slow shutter speed techniques. Considering the dancers were improvising and we were only using mobile phones for lights I think the results are quite promising...



The top 2 images were taken with an 8 second shutter and the bottom 2 were taken with 4 second shutters. Even just being in the studio catching glimpses of the movement and the dancers with the naked eye was interesting so I'm looking forward to developing this idea further and think, with choreographed movement and photography, the effects could be very interesting.

Light Graffiti

I stumbled upon some light graffiti artists recently and it occurred to me that it'd be a really interesting way of capturing movement in a still image. There are a lot of people doing this at the moment, some of the best I've found are Lichtfaktor and this film clip (scroll to the bottom).

I happen to have some glow sticks handy and a few bike lights to experiment with this weekend so hopefully I'll have something to show next week.

Painting by Keywords

I was pointed in the direction of net.art generator by Dan and spent ages on it last night creating images from keywords. The idea is that you stipulate keywords, net.art generator searches google images for matches and collages those images into a new image.

I restricted myself to 'firebox', 'dance' and 'theatre' and was quite pleased that the majority of images included were my own (my meta tagging must be pretty accurate). Some of them are really interesting and some are awful but that's part of the fun. It seemed to me like painting by numbers but with even less skill involved but I'm sure it won't be long before someone convinces a gallery to exhibit this as their work.