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.
Once again i’m teaching a workshop on programming for the iPhone using the iPhone SDK at Machine Project. The course is designed to be a good introduction to Xcode, Objective-C and making real-world applications for the AppStore. We won’t cover the basics of programming, so some programming experience is required.
The workshop starts July 5th and meets 4 times. For more info check out the course page.
Doing a one-night workshop September 23 on Regular Expressions at The Public School. We’ll cover the basics of understanding Regex syntax, using Regex in a few popular languages, and look a few common use cases. More info here.
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.
My new video Silent will be shown in the Hecuba curated film Screening tonight @ space 15 twenty. The screening features works by:
Lucky Dragons
Mecca Vazie Andrews
Melina Ausikatis
Diaz
We Are The World
Rainbow Arabia (directed by Keith Musil)
Leyna Marika Papach
Nina McNeely
Renata Raksha
Peter Moran
Chandler McWilliams
High Places (Rob Barber)
Molly Shiot
Hawnay Troof (directed by Joseph Whitt)
Silent was created algorithmically using silent films and audio processing. More about the piece coming soon.