Up late and restless tonight and just finished reading Mind the Pollocks: (Notes on) Art & Software by Benjamin Bratton. It gave the idea to make a “single-use” website, janetsobel.org. The site is just a re-hosting of the SWF file from Miltos Manetas’ jacksonpollock.org under a new name; and thus doing to Manetas as Pollock did to Sobel.
Silent is a two minute video created by combining frames from five classic silent films: Metropolis, Faust, Nosferatu, The Holy Mountain, and The Dragon Painter and put to the music of Charles Ives‘ Hallowe’en. The frames are chosen by custom software that compares data from each of the film’s soundtracks with the data from Ives’ music.
The software analyzes each film and records the audio (FFT) data and timecode for each frame. The final video is generated by processing an input soundtrack, in this case Hallowe’en, and finding the frames of film whose audio best fits that of the soundtrack.
Silent films were chosen as the source material because of their tight connection between narrative, visuals, and musical score. By using the soundtrack as the central driver of visual imagery, Silent inverts these relationships. This reversal allows forms typically associated with music-repetition, rhythm, movement-to express themselves visually.
I’ll be performing my piece John Henry von Neumann at Machine Project from 10-6 on Sunday June 28th. Come watch me compete against a computer to complete a drawing in an eight-hour workday. I will use pen and paper while the computer uses a plotter. More info on the Machine Project site.
Week End (mise-en-scène) is a triptych of images generated using scenes from Godard’s film Week End. Each image was created through an accumulation of colors from frames of the film, where each point in the final image shows the average color value for that point over the course of the set of frames.
The first image was made using frames from the “Analysis” scene, in which one of the main characters, Corinne, wearing only bra and panties, retells a story of a sexual encounter while siting on a desk talking to an unnamed fully clothed man.
The second image combines every frame of title text and the interstitial text used to cut the narrative.
The third image was created from the frames of the famous traffic scene, a single long tracking shot depicting a traffic jam punctuated by a horrible accident.