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.

Faces was a short film created as a backdrop for Hecuba’s performance at the screening of dublab’s Vision Version series. Working with Jon and Isabelle (Hecuba), we considered that the performance and screening was being held at the Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles, so we decided to create a piece to highlight our experience of LA, celebratory but dreamy, filled with chance encounters with friends and acquaintances but soon fading from memory. Memory, we decided, begins to fade with the faces. Faces of people we hardly know, or know so well we think them rather than see them, quickly disappear. We don’t remember the gamut of expressions that moved across our friends’ faces one night. We remember an average, the extremes, how moods changed, and maybe extrapolate from there what the faces must have looked like.

From here it was easy, we needed to remove the faces from the clips of a night out. But just as remembering is faulty and inconsistent, so is forgetting. So using custom software built using face detection algorithms, we blindly processed the video, and replaced all the faces found in the video with the average the color from the surrounding area. The result was imperfect, fractured and unpredictable, somewhat like memory.

On Tuesday August 5th at The Silent Movie Theater, dublab is having a screening of their Vision Version films. After the screening, Hecuba will be performing and I’ve been working with them to create some new visuals to accompany the performance. It should be really fun because Saul Levitz and Trevin Matcek are filming the performance to make a new film for the series.

Other artists involved include:
BABY DEE (Drag City)
DAEDELUS (Ninja Tune)
EXCEPTER (Paw-Tracks)
ARIEL PINK (Paw Tracks)
DON CAVALLI (Everloving)
HEALTH (Lovepump United)
PETER WALKER (raga guitar legend)
ALESSI (myspace.com/alessimusic)
LANGHORNE SLIM (Kemado Records)
LUCKY DRAGONS (Marriage Records)
OVER THE ATLANTIC (Carpark Records)
CLUSTER (German space rock legends)
RAIN MACHINE AKA KYP MALONE (TV on the Radio)
STEVIE JACKSON (Belle & Sebastian)
TOM BROSSEAU (Fat Cat Records)
WHY? (Anticon)

FILMS BY:
MATT AMATO, SAUL LEVITZ, PETER SHANEL, JULIA CROON, FERNANDO CARDENAS, THRILLHOUSE PRODUCTIONS, ROB SCHROEDER, TREVIN MATCEK, DAVE SHAFEI, BEN BARNES, JOSH FORBES, CLAY LIPSKY

More info at Vision Version.

Friends and collaborators Hecuba are playing at the triple canopy launch party tomorrow night at SiteLA, and I’ll be doing some processing-powered live visuals during the show. If you’re in LA and looking for something to do it should be a great night.

So everything went pretty well the other night. A few places wrote about the show and the band’s “unique” choice of fashion accessories. It was a difficult task of showing images from Lauren’s forthcoming book, many of which feature Devendra, while not showing too many pictures of him projected behind him which is just weird. We did our best and tried to pick the strongest shots that allowed for some fun animation potential. At one point, Devendra got upset about his image on the screen, but in the end I think it all worked out.

For the animations we used a combination of manual work in After Effects and procedural elements from processing. The procedural elements were fairly simple, some image averaging to blend faces together, some perlin noise to make images flap in the wind, a few particles, a little bit of random walking lines, and — in perhaps the most bizarre code I’ve ever written — recursively packing the space around Devendra and Greg using images of the prosthetic penises they wore for a Megapuss photo shoot with Lauren.

The entire animation lasted about 40 minutes, so I’ve compressed all that into a quick 1 minute video showing all the vignettes back-to-back. Something is definitely lost since we were going for a thick, slow, molasses-y feel to the whole thing, but who has 40 minutes on the internet?

More information on the Hammer Website.