DIGI Arts 104

For my final project I wanted to make various gifs of me recording a song in the production studio in Pollard. My inspiration came from a friend who told me that the process of recording a song was really cool, and I decided I wanted my project to tell a story which I will show through my gifs. I took various pictures during the process, and overall it took us about 6 hours to record the song. We broke it up in 2 days: 3 hours one day, then 3 hours the next.

Below is a picture of the studio where we recorded:

Below is a snap chat I took of my friend Mitchell who co-produced the song with me and also helped me create my gifs!

The video shows him setting up the microphones and plugging them into the cable so we could start recording in the production studio.

The first step to making a song was that I had to write it out. I love to write poetry and all sorts of songs. Composition is something I am really into, so I took inspiration out in songs. Below is a picture of some of the songs I recorded.

I spent about 2 hours just recording piano, and i actually got some pretty cool gifs from it!

I also used a real drum set in my gifs, and also in my song!

The next step towards producing this recording was to adjust the levels. I thought this would also make an extremely cool gif. I ended up taking the gif about 8 times because I couldn’t get the speed just right. The lighting in the studio was also super dark so I had to fiddle with exposure a little bit.

As well as drums, a guitar was also used in the recording. Here’s a snippet of my friend Brandon playing some of the guitar we used.

After hours of recording and rerecording, Mitchell and I started to listen to the track. We ended up getting the BPM and guitar volume wrong, which meant we had to go back into the studio and re-record.

Here are some epic videos from us working on the songs/gifs!

FINALLY! HERE ARE ALL THE GIFS I CREATED IN THE PROCESS 🙂 

GIF 1: 

This gif shows me practicing piano for the song. I practiced for hours and hours. The thing my foot is hitting is called a petal, which sustains the notes I play on the piano.

GIF 2:

This is a gif I took of Mitchell playing the drums for the song! We ended up using electric drums, but all in all this gif is one of my favorites and shows his true talent!

GIF 3: 

Mitchell helped me take this gif while I was messing around on piano during a break we were taking. I think this gif is cool because the entire song was drafted on piano and then we added a bunch to it. The skeleton of the song is all piano based, but with a cool twist!

GIF 4: 

Before Brandon played electric guitar, we had to plug in our Flextone amp so we could connect the guitar to the production studio! This gif is actually 16 frames, and i reversed it and doubled it.

GIF 5: 

After recording the song (80,129,398 times lol lol lol) We had to match the levels while we edited the song.

GIF 6:

This gif was really awesome to work on because it was the shot of me recording Mitchell on the drums!

GIF 7: 

I took this gif of Mitchell fixing the quality of our sound while recording using our sound board! This gif took a lot of tries to make it flow, however I love how it turned out and I loved how we were able to use the board in our song.

THE MOMENT YOU ALL HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR…….OUR SONG. 

TOTAL HOURS:

2 hours: for thinking of an idea and project to do (even though it took like 3 days to come up with the idea lol)

4 hours: for editing the gifs on photoshop

3 hours: taking 3 gifs during our first rehearsal and recording session.

3 hours: taking 4 gifs during our second rehearsal with Brandon.

3 hours: producing the song and finalizing it to be able to put it on wordpress

Chris Milk is an American entrepreneur, innovator, director, photographer, and immersive artist. He is Founder and CEO of Within (Virtual Reality)(formerly Vrse), a virtual reality technology company, and Founder and Creative Director of Here Be Dragons (formerly Vrse.works), a virtual reality production company. Milk began his career directing music videos and commercials for top artists and brands, and in subsequent years became best known for bridging the gap between emerging technologies and new mediums for storytelling. Milk’s work has been exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Barbican Centre in London, CENTQUATRE in Paris, and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. Milk has been honored with the Grand Prix Cannes Lions, the D&AD Black Pencil, the Grand Clio, and SXSW’s ‘Best of Show’ alongside multiple Grammy nominations, MTV Moon Men, and the UK MVA Innovation Award. Milk was named to Adweek’s Creative 100 list in 2015 as one of the 50 Most Creative People by Advertising Age in 2011 and 2015, and one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company in 2012. Milk presented at TED in 2015 on the power of virtual reality as a medium to advance humanity, and again in 2016 on the birth of virtual reality as a new art form.

Chris Milk uses cutting edge technology to produce astonishing films that delight and enchant. But for Milk, the human story is the driving force behind everything he does. In this short, charming talk, he shows some of his collaborations with musicians including Kanye West and Arcade Fire, and describes his latest, mind-bending experiments with virtual reality.

The Treachery of Sanctuary, currently touring the world with The Creators Project, is a large-scale interactive triptych: a story of birth, death, and transfiguration that uses projections of the participants’ own bodies to unlock a new artistic language.  

The work consists of three 30-foot high white panel frames suspended from the ceiling on which digitally captured shadows are reprojected.  A shallow reflecting pool sits between the viewers and the screens.  In the background, an openFrameworks application utilizes the Microsoft Kinect SDK for Windows.  This talks to a front end running Unity3D in which articulated 3D models of birds interact with the shadows captured by three hidden Kinects. 

http://www.exquisiteforest.com/

THIS EXQUISITE FOREST 2012

A collaborative storytelling experiment, and a collaboration with Aaron Koblin.  This work explores narrative as a living breathing evolving organism.   Where as most stories are generated by one and told to many, this piece allows for the collective conscious to steer the path of a multitude of constantly evolving narrative arcs.   As participants can add to any branch they choose, our hope is that the most compelling branches are the ones that people are inclined to further contribute to.  A virtual natural selection of narrative then occurs as the strongest most engaging stories survive and flourish.

The online component allows paticipants to create short animations that build off one another as they explore a specific theme. The result is a collection of branching narratives resembling the trees of a forest.

A physical installation is located in the collection galleries on Level 3 at The Tate Modern in London, and will be open for approximately one year beginning on July 23, 2012.

 

Apollo XVIII is a multi-channel video installation which interprets man’s relationship to space 
exploration and presents an imagined mission to the moon; a mission born in the virtual age.

During March 2015, Times Square was transformed into a virtual launchpad as Apollo XVIII played across dozens of electronic billboards from 11:57 p.m. to midnight. In collaboration with NASA, footage was filmed at Cape Canaveral, combined with Hubble imagery, rare material from the NASA archives and original computer-generated imagery to fabricate the fictitious mission.

Combining iconic moments from past and present with the wholly synthetic, Apollo XVIII presented a new collective viewing experience, calling into question the nature of fact and fiction, reality 
versus perception and context.

Through a computer-generated time-lapse study, Sea of Tranquility captures the 1969 Apollo 11 spacecraft and American flag planted on the moon in a state of gradual disintegration. The sound, culled from recorded radio transmissions between mission control and the lunar base, is removed of all dialogue so that only the beeping radio carrier signals, static, and interference are audible. Representative of the decay of American idealism from the 1960s till present day, the film compresses years into seconds, beginning with the iconic original image transmitted on television and ending as an evocative depiction of the idle rubble that remains.

POWER shows a continuous camera move from extreme close-up of Mr. West revealing an a neoclassical video tableau showing characters and creatures surrounding him in an abstract environment – all moving in extreme slow motion.

Inspired by Michelangelo’s frescos in the Sistine Chapel, the piece depicts a faux historical moment – an empire on the brink of collapse from its own excess, decadence and corruption.

I THOUGHT THIS WAS SO COOL I LOVE KANYE AND IM SO HAPPY HE USED IT TO INSPIRE HIS WORK

Evan Roth is an American artist based in Paris whose practice visualizes and archives culture through unintended uses of technologies. Creating prints, sculptures, videos and websites, his work explores the relationship between misuse and empowerment and the effect that philosophies from hacker communities can have when applied to digital and non-digital systems.

Roth’s work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art NYC and has been exhibited at various institutions, including the Centre Pompidou, the Kunsthalle Wien, the Tate and the front page of Youtube. He has received numerous awards, including the Golden Nica from Prix Ars Electronica, Rhizome/The New Museum commissions and the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award.

http://www.evan-roth.com/work/

Sara Ludy’s practice investigates the confluence of the physical and virtual. Her works include websites, animation, video, sculpture, and audio-visual performance. Traversing the online virtual world Second Life, Ludy photographs domestic interiors, landscapes, and other scenes that are iconographically familiar, yet feel otherworldly. Alongside this practice, she three-dimensionally renders architectural forms and sculptures, each one imbued with the mysticism of the digital uncanny: a space between what is known and unknown, within reach but just out of grasp.

Previous exhibitions of Ludy’s work include the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; Berkeley Art Museum, California; Honor Fraser, Los Angeles; bitforms gallery, New York; Postmasters Gallery, New York; Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York; Interstate Projects, Brooklyn; Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; Western Front, Vancouver; Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Carroll Fletcher, London; Espace Verney-Carron, Lyon; and C-Space, Beijing.

Memory Burn
Jul 10, 2013 – Aug 16, 2014

PostPictures
Dec 19, 2013 – Jan 25, 2014

Sara Ludy: Subsurface Hell
February 7, – March 7, 2016

My flipbook project had a lot of meaning to me. I wanted to create my sticky notes to portray a story. Since I feel like art mimics life, (ha ha) I decided to draw out something person and turn my feelings into art. This is really important to me, and frankly I believe this is one of my best projects and creations yet.

Takeshi Murata is an American contemporary artist who creates digital media artworks using video and computer animation techniques.

Murata has developed painterly techniques for processing video using glitches and errors. Conjuring digital turbulence from broken DVD encoding, he carefully tends bad video compression to generate sometimes sinuous, sometimes violent flows of digital distortion. With a powerfully sensual force that is expressed in videos, loops, installations and electronic music, Murata’s synaesthetic experiments in hypnotic perception appear at once seductively organic and totally digital.
Takeshi Murata was born in 1974 in Chicago, IL. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 with a B.F.A. in Film/Video/Animation. Murata has exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Peres Projects, Los Angeles; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; Eyebeam, New York; FACT Centre, Liverpool, UK; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; New York Underground Film Festival; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, Foxy Production, New York, and Deitch Projects, New York, among others.

http://www.eai.org/artistBio.htm?id=10311

Jodie Mack is an experimental animator who received her MFA in film, video, and new media from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Combining the formal techniques and structures of abstract/absolute animation with those of cinematic genres, her handmade films use collage to explore the relationship between graphic cinema and storytelling, the tension between form and meaning. Musical documentary or stroboscopic archive: her films study domestic and recycled materials to illuminate the elements shared between fine-art abstraction and mass-produced graphic design. The works unleash the kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects and question the role of decoration in daily life.

Curses (2016, 5m, digital video, color, sound.)

Made entirely by hand from cut marbled paper, this odyssey of remnants re-imagines a dream-sequence love. Video for ROOMMATE: roommatemusic.com

Let Your Light Shine (2013, 3m, 16mm, b/w + color, sound)
A spectacle for prismatic spectacles. Handmade optical polyrhythms and a thousand rainbows explore the grating equation.

Point de Gaze (2012, 5m, 16mm, col., silent.)
Named after a type of Belgian lace, this fabric flicker film investigates intricate illusion and optical arrest.

***Mack’s 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Images Festival, Projections at the New York Film Festival, and the Viennale. She has presented solo programs at the 25FPS Festival, Anthology Film Archives, BFI London Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, National Gallery of Art, REDCAT, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, and Wexner Center for the Arts among others. Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Cinema Scope, The New York Times(YAAAS QUEEN), and Senses of Cinema. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 2014 “25 New Faces to Watch” and one of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ YBCA 100 in 2015, she currently works as an Associate Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College.

Pippilotti Rist focus is video/audio installations because there is room in them for everything (painting, technology, language, music, movement, lousy, flowing pictures, poetry, commotion, premonition of death, sex and friendliness) – like in a compact handbag. Her opinon is: Arts task is to contribute to evolution, to encourage the mind, to guarantee a detached view of social changes, to conjure up positive energies, to create sensuousness, to reconcile reason and instinct, to research possibilities and to destroy clichés and prejudices.

Rist’s works have been exhibited widely at museums and festivals throughout Europe, Japan and the US, including the biennials in Sao Paulo, Venice, Istanbul, the Caribbean and Santa Fe. In 2000 the Public Art fund NY commission Open My Glade, was shown on the screen in Times Square. Pipilotti Rist’s multimedia video works such as, I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986)‚ Yoghurt on Skin, Velvet on TV (1995)‚ Sip My Ocean (1996), and Remake of the Weekend (1998), blur the boundaries between visual art and popular culture and explore the unfamiliar in the everyday. Her lush, seductive images recruit the idiom of commercial advertising and music videos to create a highly individual artistic language informed by her past in a music band and as a set designer.

End is Over All :

“Looking Through Pixel Forest,” from 2016, a hanging LED installation and media player. Two videos alternate on the walls: “Mercy Garden” and “Worry Will Vanish Horizon,” both from 2014.

Video still from Pipilotti Rist’s “Mercy Garden” (2014), a two-channel video and sound installation.