tag: Video

Artwork and visualisers for Echo Juliet’s latest EP, Lift Your Face to the Sun.

Artwork and visualisers for the Basic Waveforms EP by Charles Celeste Hutchins.

Artwork and visualisers created for Abandon Reality by Echo Juliet.

Abandon Reality is the debut EP from Echo Juliet, a producer, percussionist, activist and DJ based in Birmingham, UK. She crafts warm, percussion-filled electronica to help her escape to a more positive space, often inspired by nature.

Early support has come from BBC 6Music tastemakers Tom Ravenscroft & Deb Grant, Steve Lamacq, Cerys Matthews and Unclassified on BBC Radio 3.

Heavyweight Champ is a critique of stereotypical ways Black men have been depicted since the early days of video games.

The title of the work comes from what is considered to be the first game to feature a Black character, Heavyweight Champ. The arcade game, released by Sega in 1976, allows players to take control of one of two boxers. As the game is displayed in monochrome and the race of the characters is not explicitly stated it is debatable whether the darker grey boxer is Black, though general consensus is that the character is coded as Black.

From 1st - 29th July I was happy to be selected as an artist in residence for The New Art Gallery Walsall’s Stay at Home Residencies.

In the second blog post I looked at how I approached filming. In this third and final blog post I’ll be detailing my sound making process and sharing the finished film.

The next stage in making this film was working on the sound. As you can hear in a couple of the clips in the previous blog post the area that I live in is really really quiet! Everyone in the local area was using the Summer time to sit outside bathing in the sunlight. Was very relaxing for sure but recordings of the ambient background noise didn’t make for an interesting soundtrack. There was once the sound of a wood chipper but otherwise it was mostly silent. At times me playing music was the loudest sound!

From 1st - 29th July I was happy to be selected as an artist in residence for The New Art Gallery Walsall’s Stay at Home Residencies.

In the first blog post I looked at my influences and research carried out before I started making work. In this second blog post I’ll be showing some of the filming I did.

With the research conducted and panic now over I started filming again. I began by filming various things in my home. I tried to focus on shots that would have some movement in them, even if it were only background movement. Because of this most of my shots look out of a window. Although the background is blurred whatever movement there is - be it the trees, people, or lights turning on/off - makes the still shot that little bit more interesting.

From 1st - 29th July I was happy to be selected as an artist in residence for The New Art Gallery Walsall’s Stay at Home Residencies.

The New Art Gallery Walsall has adapted its Studio residency programme in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic to support three artists based in the West Midlands to produce work from their homes between May and July this year.

Following an open-call to artists based in the West Midlands, the Gallery received 60 varied proposals from a diverse range of artists working across the region. The many challenges that artists are facing during lockdown were well articulated. In selecting, we were keen to see opportunities for artistic and professional development during these challenging times, to support creative approaches to practice amid imposed restrictions and to explore the benefits and possibilities of sharing with an online audience.

windows.exe has stopped working is about that moment of uncertainty when software begins exhibiting signs of an impending malfunction. The software stutters, glitches, begins acting erratically, sometimes altogether freezing with no indication of when normality will return. When faced with this hopeless situation the illusion of flawless technology is shattered and we’re reminded that technology is imbued with the flaws and imperfections of its creators.

windows.exe has stopped working was commissioned by Phoenix for The Idle Index.

I took a bit of a break from writing the Development Updates. September was pretty busy with Bcc: (more on that below) and then I was completing a commission for Will’s Kitchen/The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and preparing for my solo exhibition, We Are Your Friends.

With all of that now completed I’m writing a few posts about one project in particular: Bcc:

The Bcc: exhibition opened at Vivid Projects on Friday 6th September. It was a collaboration between Vancouver-based Decoy Magazine and Birmingham-based Vivid Projects. The exhibition featured a curated selection of works from Decoy Magazine’s online art subscription service called Bcc:. The basic premise is that each month you’d get specially commissioned art in your e-mail inbox.

On 5th May Blood Sport released their latest LP, Live at Cafe Oto which, as the name suggests, is a live recording of a 40 minute set they did as part of their residency at Cafe Oto.

To coincide with its release Blood Sport asked me to create a one-take video. The video below shows track two from the LP, Melts Into.

The full 40 minute video will be made available at a later date. In the meantime you should buy their LP. They will be performing alongside Heavy Lifting at Supersonic Festival on June 16th.

On 6th February I’ll be part of the TRANSFORMERS screening happening at the College Art Association Conference in Washington DC.

Computer programming is an often invisible force that affects many aspects of our contemporary lives. From how we gather our news, maintain our libraries, or navigate our built environment, code shapes the interfaces and information they connect to. Artists who work with these languages as material can critically excavate code and its effects. The works included in this screening include animation and video that are produced through the use and manipulation of code and/or data.

Music video for Light Under the Door by My Panda Shall Fly.

Recently there’s been a trend amongst glitch artists to do more video glitches. I’ve been pretty quiet on that front whilst I work on my techniques. Here’s the first results of my experiments using Chris Cunningham’s short film Rubber Johnny as a test subject

Just from these tests I can see the opportunities that using video presents, especially when using audio. I can definitely see more of my work being like this

Inspired by Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room piece I have taken Dataface one step further. In glitch art we only ever see result of the process of damaging an image, video or sound. Rarely can we observe this process as it happens within the computer in an instant. Using Alvin Lucier’s 1969 piece I Am Sitting in a Room as inspiration, in this piece I show the many steps taken to damage data to the point where it loses all meaning. Font files are files that attribute a style to the otherwise plain text that we see on screen. The computer treats this only as an attribute of the text and can understand it regardless of what font file is used or how it looks to the viewer. In this piece I have used a script, created in collaboration with G Bulmer, that explores the font file and damages it by randomising the values that construct each glyph. The computer, doing only what it has been instructed to do, continually attacks the font files’ data to the point where it is sometimes corrupted and not even it can interpret it correctly. The resulting video shows the gradual damaging of the data. The viewer will struggle to find meaning amongst the visual noise whilst the computer still understands it.

Now that I have the Game Boy Camera and Printer, LSDJ and will soon have the Transferer and 32M Cartridges I’m hoping to make something like this

One thing I also really like is this dance piece:

I would’ve like to have seen the dancers incorporate more erratic movement and even some sort of costumes (Princess Peach and Mario perhaps), but overall I think it shows that Game Boy Music isn’t just for the hobbyist.