22 May 2007

Cornelius - Wataridori (music video); Gum (live)





I saw Cornelius play in Washington DC several years ago and it remains to be one of the best live shows I have seen in which audio and video were presented in tight relation to one another. Their sense of visual music is spot-on.

25 April 2007

Bill Viola Interview and Marc Aschenbrenner's Zweite Sonne





I like Bill Viola's comparison of video cameras to reindeer bones with notches cut into them. He is profound in his assertion that its the telling of stories and leaving of objects that is the fundamental activity of human existence.



I recently attended the Düsseldorf and Köln art fairs and it was transparently clear that the contemporary art world is dominated by a marketplace driven by the collection of objects. What little video I did see I found remarkably boring and derivative, with the exception of Zweite Sonne by Marc Aschenbrenner on exhibit at the Olaf Stüber Gallery booth in Köln. It exhibited a property I would like to associate with my slowly developing theory of Quantinuity; namely that it transported an otherwise virtual object into physical space. The video was projected inside a giant black plastic balloon-suit that also appears in the video itself as the central subject of the video.

19 April 2007

Eyeliner 3D

Is Eyeliner 3D really holography or just smoke and mirrors?
And does it even matter?

Given my background and formal education, as well as my admitted nostalgic love of certain masterpieces of celluloid cinema, it is challenging for me to conceive of my work in terms of depth. I have always been inclined to see 2-dimensional pictures in my head when imagining a story for a film. And I guess that's just it; proto-quantum cinema and/or live cinema are not really films at all; they may be "features" or even "feature-length" at times, but I am feeling more and more that the proto-quantum cinema will find its deepest roots in theater. Stumbling across technologies like Eyeliner 3D confirm this suspicion.

So while it may not be possible in my lifetime to realize true holographic projection (and certainly not nanopixels), several layers (perhaps as many in late-stage 32-bit video games) may be around the corner. The promise that these virtual layers of inszenierung may have for proto-quantum cinema may in fact cross the minimum thresholds of depth reconstruction necessary to truly define a new artform.

So do we really need absolute depth resolution? Or will foreground, midground and background (with some additional layers) suffice?