Tesseracting in Action

Now let's see them grab the sound too!
Thanks to notthisbody for the link.

Peaches "Take You On" vs. "Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc."

Two new videos revisit the aesthetics of an object-oriented moving image paradigm, this time in addressing the age-old dilemma of how to get more characters than usually physically possible into the same virtual space. For more background on my thoughts about object-oriented images, see this post from January where I discuss it with some other nifty examples.



Continuing a tradition of blue screen music videos reminiscent of the works of Zbig Rybczynski, the latest Peaches music video produced by Angie Reed is a sarcastic and entertaining solution to the puzzle created when a musician has multiple visual identities and a treasure trove of wacky costumes. The simulated 3D of the video allows us to access Peaches in all the glory of her various selves in the same Tron-inspired virtual space.

On a more hi-fi tip, utilizing Soho's best and brightest to do some super cool compositing and motion capture, Partizan and Chris Cairns present us the highly entertaining and vaguely Cunningham-ish "Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc.". This videomusical composition also solves a similar 'how to get enough characters in the same space' dilemma, this time by removing their bodies and just leaving their heads!



Be sure to check out the Neurosonics Microsite for some behind-the-scenes photos.

Hypercubist Romantic Comedy

What a lovely short Hypercubist video! This gives great visual presence to ideas of time travel and teleportation within photo-realistic aesthetics. Bravo!

Temporal Resolution

In my very first post to this blog I complained about the limitations of video frame rates (temporal resolution). I was reading more on the products offered by Geometric Informatics and it seems their GeoVideo Real-Time Motion Capture Camera runs at a frame rate that begins to make things interesting on the road towards what I will call Granular Motion Synthesis.

Granular Synthesis in reference to video has been inaccurately co-opted for some years by Kurt Hentschlaeger and Ulf Langheinrich when in fact they are only breaking down the video signal into frame-lengthed grains; 1/25th of a second or 40 milliseconds. The microsound time scale makes this claim to Granular Synthesis more poetic than truthful;

"Microsound includes all sounds on the time scale shorter than musical notes, the sound object time scale, and longer than the sample time scale. Specifically this is shorter than one tenth of a second and longer than 10 milliseconds"

GeoVideo claims to acquire "absolute coordinates at 180 fps" - this equates to 7.2 times more temporal resolution than standard 25 fps PAL video. These GeoVideo "frames" are therefore each 5.5 milliseconds in duration. To give this some context on the microsound time scale, 5 milliseconds is the duration of a honey bee’s wing flap.

Of course the problem lies in a lack of real-time playback systems for 180 fps video. No DVD player, tape player, celluloid projection system or means which doesn't involve custom hardware or a computer is capable of playing this kind of content back to an audience at its full temporal resolution. Even IMAX HD is only 48 fps.

So put plainly, even if I could make a composition of a honey bee dancing wild patterns through spacetime using Granular Motion Synthesis, I would only have the satisfaction of watching it on my laptop. Showing it to a large theater of people seems to still be a ways down the road.

Bill Viola Framed: Where are the angels?

Watching a clip from Bill Viola's "I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like" on YouTube, it struck me how the computer restates the frame again and again. I took this photo to try to communicate the phenomenon of how my computer monitor, the web browser and the YouTube site, triple the frame of Viola's piece, which itself has a frame in its own frame (the frame of the video monitor, here with an image of a toucan). Yet even as the idea struck me to document my observation I realized I would be compounding it further by blogging it; adding the frames of the blog, the browser, and the computer again.

I have been thinking about a solution to the theoretical problem of the holographic cinema. My solution is theoretically elegant and potentially physically and technologically impossible. It was a flash of insight I had in a bar in Berlin during my visit to Transmediale.

The tyranny is the projector. The revolutionary answer is what I like to call the nanopixel. Imagine a microscopic cube capable of emitting a different colored light on each of its faces. Now imagine millions of these microscopic cubes suspended in some kind of electromagnetic vacuum. Each cube can wirelessly receive color information, luminosity information and dynamic positioning information in space. These nanopixels form ephemeral solids representing actors, sets and props; digital skins containing hollow cinematic bodies. A kind of elaborate, programmable, kinetic, narrative sculpture medium.

To record the data for the six faces of the nanopixels, a sophisticated system of either four (tetrahedron formation) or six (cubic formation) high-frequency, high-resolution imaging scanners would be deployed on set to get all angles necessary. The audience could sit in the round or in more conventional theatric seating.

My friend Florian Grond analyzed it in terms of mystical metaphor in which the scanner-cameras are the omniscient eye-of-god and the nanopixels are angels.