ecopolis

MMIX* is a timeless work in four interactive tableaus, where each visitor is invited to follow with his eyes and ears what his mouse gestures reveal. At each caress, sound and visual elements get randomly muddled up on the screen creating always new combinations. A work travelling between real and surreal, dream and mind, rage and fright, where humour and drama are cruelly mixed to suggest the sad patterns of our contemporary reality.

These works are part of Nicolas Clauss‘ virtual gallery, flyingpuppet, a collection of digital tableaus started in 2001.

MMIX is currently exhibited at Japan Media Art Festival, National Art Center, Tokyo.

Explanation of ” The Big Plot ” project, a Recombinant Fiction piece.
Half speech with questions by the audience and replies by the author, as a forum format.

Official website of The Big Plot project:
thebigplot.net

On May 10, 2008 — Pangea Day — sites in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked to produce a 4-hour program of powerful films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music. The program will be broadcast live to the world through the Internet, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones.

Pangea is the name of the original super-continent which contained all the world’s land mass before the continents started splitting apart 250 million years ago. We’re launching Pangea Day with the vision that the people of the world can begin to overcome their divisions, and that the power of film can help make it possible.

You can host a Pangea Day event in your home, school, town square, or wherever you want to gather your friends, family, and community. Visit www.pangeaday.org/events.php and plot your event on our map today!

website for more information.

Antonio Mendoza, Jimpunk and Abe Linkoln started the triptych.tv project. It seems a dadaist collection of microvideo, the result is amazing, it’s a real contemporary junkspace, you can see everything presented much more faster than TV. The structure is like a blog, but each piece is a microvideo to be seen in the contest of all the page.

Presented in its first version at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis at the end of the nineties, nocinema.org is an ever-evolving streaming application developed by Jérôme Joy: French artist and composer. This project is a net-based documentary/fiction of web interludes that appear differently each time. Nocinema.org can be interpreted as an improbable cinema or a movie in which both actors and action appear to have wandered out of shot, having no beginning and no end, no participants and no storyboard, except perhaps subjective interpretations born of an impulse to impose purpose and meaning upon random stimuli.

Nocinema.org is an automatic process, drawing upon strings of live streaming webcams across the world, transmitting live scenes collected from different locations with added panoramic movements and temporized on-line editing, into which some black shots are inserted (listening without visual). The sound, each time offering a different sequenced overlay, comes from a shared soundfiles database which is fed and updated by a team of sound artists/partners, including Magali Babin, DinahBird, Christophe Charles, Yannick Dauby, Chantal Dumas, Jérôme Joy, Luc Kerléo, Alain Michon and Jocelyn Robert.

The Bedazzle Studios has directed a movie entirely shooted inside Second Life. It all started from Eric Call, senior artist at Linden Lab, that came across the story of Silver Bells and Golden Spurs in a book of cowboy poetry several years ago, then he decided to shoot it. He started realizing a screen play adaptation and creating some of the stanza of the film, but it was too big to realize it alone. One day one of Linden Lab’s engineers demoed a QuickTime movie applied to an avatar face mesh and Eric realized that he could try to shoot his cowboy movie using this new Second Life’s feature.

So it started the making of the first movie shooted inside Second Life. Eric started the research phase made of visits to several mining and ghost towns in the Sierra Nevada to gather reference material and textures for the production and readings of books and surfingon the Internet to find images of the right buildings, clothing and props.
Then he needed some help and he find it by the Bedazzle Studios artists for recreation of the film.

On the “making page” of the film Eric Call explains deeply all the process, talking also about the research goals that he saw during the production phase that could serve as a proof of concept for several features, particularly speech emulation.

Also he talks about the acting of the avatars: “All of the actors were given a library of character animations they could manipulate through control scripts, and I directed them to perform specific actions during video capture. This allowed them some creative freedom so they could personalize their character, and at the same time assured me that I’d get the kind of actions I wanted.”

And about the goals: “Uncovering bugs, developing techniques for building and texturing, and revealing areas for improvement are just a few of the benefits to Linden Lab. Bells and Spurs sets new goals for quality and creativity in resident creations. It promotes a level of thoughtfulness and craftsmanship that will empower residents to use more of Second Life’s capabilities.”

An interesting project of videoremix is going on under the Turbulence art network and it’s called Disconnect: partecipants are Subculture, Abe Linkoln and Jimpunk.

Today we talk with Peter Horvath, who has recently inaugurated a retrospective exhibition at the ACA Gallery of the Savannah College of Art and Design, in Atlanta.

Horvath presents a new DVD-installation, called Boulevard, together with other cinematic DVD’s and Internet-based video. He’s a pioneer of the genre, realizing a bridge between the nouvelle vague, the experimental cinema of the 70’s and the new possibilities of the browser-based cinema, the so-called webcinema.

ECOPOLIS: In this solo exhibition, you will present your new piece “Boulevard”, what is it about?
HORVATH: Boulevard is a 3 channel video installation. It follows two enigmatic, nameless people through their nighttime rendezvous, their drives through California canyons, their secrets, their confessions. I wanted to create a kind of intimate theatre, accessible from the web browser, a dreamlike odyssey that examines multiple states of consciousness within a shadow of family histories.

Filmed in Los Angeles, mostly at night and in the Laurel Canyon/Hollywood Blvd area close to Mullholland Drive, it’s the first work I’ve done that is made for both the web and an installation situation, constructed so that once finished for the web it could be re-constructed into 3 separate DVD’s that are projected simultaneously.

ECO: What are the influences of the web to cinema, and how has cinema mutated migrating on a network?
HORVATH: I’ve always been interested in fragmenting my narratives, and I’ve done so in past work by having multiple windows open and close within the web-browser environment, playing out various parts of the story. Boulevard is slightly different from past work in that there are no pop-up windows, and instead I’ve divided the screenspace into 3 panels of video. In the web version there are randomly placed texts that appear below the videos that tell a different part of the narrative, fragmenting things further.

ECO: I think webcinema, particularly, is an individual experience, like cinema; how did you manage to install your webcinema pieces in an open space?

HORVATH: I try to create intimate spaces to project the works large scale, but of course the intimacy is different compared to the one on one we have when interacting with the computer. With the ACA show, we constructed 4 rooms, 1 for each work.

ECO: Talking about cinema, who are your favourite contemporary authors?
HORVATH: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Scorsese, Truffault (can he be considered contemporary?) but my influences lean more toward artists than filmmakers; Bill Viola, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Francis Bacon and the Dadaist Hannah Hoch to name a few.