Sneeuwig

FMI Final Graduation Exhibition 2011

2011-06-30T04:07:00.000-07:00

Hé

2011-06-15T14:06:00.000-07:00

This section of the blog is part of the mindmap Groepsbewegingen, which you can reach here.

Hé (1998), geluidsinstallatie

The Tower, Church of separated silences

2011-06-15T06:57:00.000-07:00

This section of the blog is part of the mindmap Groepsbewegingen, which you can reach here.

The Tower, human dynamics

2011-06-15T01:00:00.001-07:00

This section of the blog is part of the mindmap Groepsbewegingen, which you can reach here.

An example of a Small World Network.

Swarm Experiment (1997)

2011-06-14T02:49:00.001-07:00

This section of the blog is part of the mindmap Groepsbewegingen, which you can reach here.

Context Group Esther Polak

2011-06-12T11:36:00.000-07:00

Here the results of the research to context shift by placing the work The Tower, Church of separated silences in different art contexts.

The Tower, Church of Separated Silences

placed in the context of collections, mirrors and isolation

The visitor of this interactive installation can only see this installation when he / she decides to participate. In the only individually accessible registration area, an image of the visitor is taken when he / she has looked at himself in the mirror for about 5 minutes . Then the visitor may enter the projection room and sees his / her own image projected. After about 15 seconds the virtual camera zooms out and shows the image to be part of a large amount of images, all placed in a grid.

Collections
Keywords: uniformity, anthropological, scientific research, daily life, repetition, conservation, consumerism, multiplicity

Placed in the context of Collections, 'The Tower, Church of separated silences' is more about the creation of a database. Which is about conservation, protect the test of time. The multitude of human images also shows a certain uniformity of man.

Candice Breitz

King, Legend, etc: the subjects, fans of Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, Queen and John Lennon singing a song of their hero. It puts people with the same passion and with a similar act together. Breitz shows them simultaneously. All in a similar state, while singing a song from their hero, (isolated in a black room and a camera included). Because of all these fragments are shown next to each other, the power of the individual decrease and uniformity increases. 

According to The Tower, Church of Separated Silences all photographed visitors have gone through the same registration. In the case of The Tower the’re looking at themselves in the mirror for 5 minutes. Beside, all these various registrations are put together. The multiplicity plays an important role in visual. The feeling of uniformity takes the lead.

King (2006)

Marina Abramovic

The artist is present. The portrait slide as documentation of this performance shows many visitors of this exhibition who were sitting in front of the artist, Marina Abramovic. This slide is not really intended as an collection artwork, I think, but this slideshow shows the collection of people in a certain state. They have all undergone a similar experience. Perhaps a spiritual one. Because the portraits are displayed in a row, the uniformity is not as strong as when they were shown simultaneously.

The artist is present. (click to watch)

Terracotta Army 

The Terracotta Army is a name for the archaeological find of 9099 terracotta figures. The figures, dating from 210 BC, were discovered in 1974. The army was a burial gift, given to the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi. An army that accompanied the emperor in his immortality.

The emperor had in his desire for and belief in immortality put time still. It's precisely this silence that indicates the passage of time and mortality very convincingly. A clear similarity with The Tower, Church of separated silences. Also the setup in a grid with the head forward. They are individuals, there is no action or mutual contact. There is no network. The desire for timelessness.

The Tower, Church of separated silences, Ruben Boxman (2011)

Mirrors

Keywords: self-perception, awareness of your own body, spectator, object, narcissistic, imaginary "wholeness"

The Tower, Church of separated silences deals now about aware of both your own body (and the ratio of your body to space) as the idea of subject and object, spectator or witnessed. Besides that it is about honesty, about yourself to look in the mirror, you are who you are.

Dan Graham

Perhaps the most famous work of Graham is Public Space / 2 Audiences (1976). In this sculpture are two rooms separated by a double mirror. The visitor is in an ambiguous position in which he looks at himself in the mirror as well as by the public on the other side of the mirror. This is the literal representation of the coincidence of the object and the subject, the "mirror phase" of Jacques Lacan, which Graham himself like to refers to in his articles.

Wikipedia -> Mirror Phase:
The dual relationship (relation duelle) refers not only to the relation between the Ego and the body, which is always characterized by illusions of similarity and reciprocity, but also to the relation between the Imaginary and the Real. The visual identity given from the mirror supplies imaginary "wholeness" to the experience of a fragmentary real.

Public Space / 2 Audiences (1976)

Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay (1974). In a small room two large mirrors facing each other. In the room two cameras and two video monitors are placed. The visitor looks at the video screen in the delayed images of himself across the room. The public is thus both observer and object in the work of Graham.

Carsten Höller

Mirror Hall, Air de Paris, FIAC (2010) The purpose of Carsten Höller is proprioception: self-observation, awareness of your body. He has made several works using mirrors. Watch the video here.

Sliding Doors (2003), watch video here

Mirror Carousel, 2005

The Tower, Church of separated silences, Ruben Boxman (2011)

Isolation

Keywords: solitude, meditation, reflection, consciousness

Placed in the context of Isolation 'The Tower, Church of separated silences' is about to be thrown back on yourself. Awareness of yourself. But also about a desire for social contact.

Job Koelewijn

Pavilion (1999)

Bruce Nauman

Live-Taped Video Corridor, watch video here

Miroslaw Balka

How it is (2009), bekijk de video hier

The Tower, Church of separated silences, Ruben Boxman (2011)

Andreas Gursky

2011-06-10T12:13:00.000-07:00

A collection of photos by Andreas Gursky.
This section of the blog is part of the mindmap Groepsbewegingen, which you can reach here.

Kuwait Stock Exchange II
2008

Chicago, Board of Trade II
1999

Pyongyang I
2007

Loveparade
2001

Project The Tower at ForumImages

2010-11-15T04:25:00.000-08:00

At the openings weekend of ForumImages we showed a part of the installation The Tower. We took pictures of the visitors in front of a greenscreen. The visitors could built their own little profile by choosing 5 till 8 words (out of 60 words). By an AIR interface, on a touch screen, built by Arno van Oordt, people could "drag" words to their photo. After saving this little profile the photo was placed in a 3D environment showed on 2 flatscreens close to the photospot. Corresponding words, chosen by the visitors, determines the spot of the picture in the group. At the end of the weekend the group had grown to 130 people.

The software behind this placing proces, called "The Force", was built by Frans van Hoesel and was based on the Cocktail program.

I built the automatic key tool in Max. By taking a picture by a SLR camera (using Canon EOS Utility software), the key proces was activated. Max saves a .png file for the interface tool and a .tga file for "The Force". The challenge for me was to bring the different parts together and let the whole installation work smoothly for the visitor. And I think that worked out pretty well.

The next step in Project The Tower will be the use of finger scanners to recognize the visitor. After this recognition the photo of the visitor should be highlighted in the 3D environment.

Ars Electronica 2010

2010-09-07T05:59:00.000-07:00

Last weekend Adri and I hit the road for Linz, Austria, to visit the Ars Electronica. There was so much to see and hear, 4 days were hardly enough. Nothing earth-shattering, but fun. Though, the ear on arm by Stelarc was shocking fot me because of the images of the operation, view on youtube.

Here are links to some good work:

Strange google streetviews.
Logorama, very nice animation.
5 horizons, nice video installation.
Cycloïd-E, nice audio installation.
216 prepared dc-motors / filler wire 1.0mm, nice Waanzin Producties look a like.

Besides all the good work there was this realy beautiful location, an old tabacco factory. This should be an annual trip from now...

Why earthlings swarm: the locust

2010-09-01T02:28:00.000-07:00

Hunger and cannibalism make locusts swarm

27 August 2010, by Tamera Jones

Locusts move a lot faster when they're hungry and surrounded by other locusts than when they're hungry but completely alone, scientists have discovered. The findings support the idea that locusts are driven to swarm by a fear of being cannibalised by their peers. Read more. What about human?

Noorderzon 2010 (part 3)

2010-08-25T05:02:00.000-07:00

And a challenge it was, the Silhouettes project. The Silhouettes idea seemed simple but it was quite difficult. To start with the hardware, there were a view obstacles and one major fallacy. To catch the silhouettes of the passers in this narrow street I wanted to use about 4 camera's placed every 4 meters . Just to make it possible to film the passers in their 20 meters walk along the wall. Like 4 beams which make one projection on a wall I thought 4 camera inputs make 1 wide view. It doesn't work like that because of the depth and perspective of 4 camera views. Funny, after almost 10 years working with video, making such a fallacy. The solution is to place cams in a semicircle. In this case 3 cams would do the job.

The camera itself was another struggle. I knew the filming has to be done with an infrared camera because the installation would run at nighttime. Together with enough infrared light it should be possible to catch silhouettes of the passers. First of all I wanted to use the PS3 Eye camera without infrared blocker. You can find a lot of tutorials to make your usb cam an infrared cam, for example this one. Problem with all the usb cams and OSX is the lack of drivers. You've got Macam which supports many usb cams but it is impossible to switch off all automate settings of the cams. In this case it was necessary to switch off auto-exposure. To keep the silhouettes in shape there had to be infrared light at a constant level and a cam with a straight view. There is a lot of discussion about this OSX webcam thing and some people are trying to write something to control the cams, till now Dominic has done the best job. But you can't use this driver with other software like Isadora or Max. Because I wanted to use 3 cams I found an interesting firewire webcam via the Max forum, the Fire-i from Unibrain, which you can link to each other. But even this cam hasn't its own controllable driver, it is supported by OSX but you can't change the automated settings.

The next solution was using one firewire dv cam, I found a tutorial to transform a digital (photo) camera into a infrared cam by Mark Hoekstra. Because I wanted to get as much light as possible into the cam I bought a secondhand 3 CCD cam (with a tape transporting failure). I had to remove the infrared filter so I started to unscrew the cam. It was very difficult to reach the filter but in the end I found it. At the same time I discovered that I tore a miniscule multiwired cable from the 3 CCD chip, ahhhh... end of camera. Adri came with the bright idea to use a firewire cam with nightshot function which uses infrared as well and has a button to use or remove the infrared blocker. There was even a "nightshot" cam in our closet. Together with 2 lenses, a 0,65x and a 0,5x, placed on each other, it turned out the solution. The camera took, with this fisheye- like lens construction, a 10 meters wide section of the street.

The next obstacle was the light. The best way to get nice silhouettes was to highlight the background with a lot of infrared light. In this way the passers should stay black against a "white" background. But it proved impossible to highlight only the background. The following possibility was to illuminate the entire street and use background substraction in Max/Jitter. I tried some IR spots and a IR illuminator but they gave to little light. I found an useful description about how to make a heavy IR spot here. Use very dark High Temperature color gels in front of a theatre spot to block the visible light. There's still coming infrared light out of the spot. 6 x 500 Watt horizon lights with a lot of color gels did the job.

The 25 x 5 meters projection could be made by 3 short throw beams at a distance of 6 meters, unbelievable, the only windfall.

And finally, a Max/Jitter patch that uses all mentioned solutions to create a nice interactive video. Previous post: Projecting colored shadows of the passers. But when the shadows reach the edge of the wall they will explode. So this narrow street becomes a place where people losing their shadow. I used a patch of Andrew Benson from the Max/Jitter forum as starting point. Now the shadows do not explode, they crumble. It took me a few weeks and a lot of forum visits to get what I wanted but finally I've got the feeling that the Max/Jitter basics are stuck. Nice link, Flock Software, for some useful Max/Jitter objects. I used the Lens_correction.pat. "It corrects for "barrel/pin" distortion, commonly resulting from fisheye lenses".

The video is supported by sound, I found a nice sample of sub-atomic particles. This sample reacts (in volume) on the amount of black pixels in the threshold view of the camera. There were 4 speakers on top of the building producing the sound.

Primal Push

2010-08-07T14:01:00.000-07:00

Crowds often evoke feelings of fear. "The seething, irrational and violent nature of crowds are always mentioned" (Mark Earls). As I posted before, this brutal and dangerous site of crowds inspires me. Two weeks ago we were confronted with the irrational nature of a crowd at the Loveparade in Duisburg. One group being in panic, pushes its own members dead. Awful.

This kind of pushing is like a primal. All these individual choices to get away as quick as possible results in a very strong, brutal and relentless push. The deadly primal push. That's what man fears and causes an even greater force. In english the word crowd means a group of people, as a verb it means pushing (just found by using my dutch speaking english friend google translate).

This very dangerous pushing by irrational act also appeared on the dead memorial at De Dam, Amsterdan this year. You wish that you can move as a real solid group at such moments. Without strange and unexpected movements by individuals. The strange thing is that one day after the Loveparade disaster I saw a movie of the Japanese Metro by zapping on TV. Here you can see that knowledge is everything, there's no fear for pushing anymore, everyone stays calm, as a solid group.

Interaction / Herd / Mark Earls / Project The Tower

2010-07-31T14:14:00.000-07:00

At the moment I'm reading "Herd - How to change mass behaviour by harnessing our true nature" by Mark Earls. Mark is regarded as a marketing guru and the book is part a marketing book. But the other part is about mass behaviour in general. The main point is that western culture idolize individualism. We want to see people as self-critical individuals who make their well-considered choices. We want to forget that we actually are "über social beings", who have got this far (on this world) because they are a very strong herd, "the ultimate herd" (dutch title of the book). Individual behavior leans very much on interaction. Most choises are made with the social environment in mind. We are inextricably linked to the group, our behaviour is group behaviour most of the time. Of course everyone knows but in western culture we try very hard to forget. Nice examples of evidence, group behaviour in nice pictures, Exactitudes.

For the opening of ForumImages we've got an idea which is the logical continuation of the interactive work Social Cocktails from Frans van Hoesel. Together with Frans we will work on a version for visitors of the opening. By asking questions to the visitor and take a picture of him, there will be a human edition of the Social Cocktails work. Same answers given by the visitors will attrack pictures of the visitors to each other on a videoscreen. It's a model in which is little place for interaction. When the photos are on the screen, no interaction is possible anymore. So it's a model which shows the interaction that has already occurred, which has formed an individual. By this model you can see if the outside matches the inside when the photos form groups. Maybe this will result in a "living" kind of "Exactitudes". Maybe some of the persons who form a group on the screen will form a group in front of the screen. I feel hit potential on network parties :)

Something in my head says that there must be a way to show how people are influenced by each other in a direct way. To make it visible how groups will grow or shrink. Something in the question? Something with the openness of the responses, the answers on the screen? Hmm, don't know yet.

We want to make different kind of installations with the different themes of The Tower. From now on we call it Project The Tower. So more as generic.

Lynching

2010-07-22T07:30:00.000-07:00

I heard an interesting but also scary story on the radio. I forgot this Dutch historical fact. The story about the brothers Cornelis and Johan De Witt. Johan de Witt was the Grand Pensionary, roughly similar to a modern Prime Minister, of The Dutch Republic. On August 20, 1672, a lynch mob in The Hague killed and mutilated both brothers. This lynch mob was organized (some historians believe Willem van Oranje was involved) but it tells something about group behaviour. Here people became animals. Here's a translation from the dutch wikipedia about lynching.

Johan was shot with one shot. Cornelis was beaten down, and shot, stabbed, ripped open and hung upside down, when he founded his head, his brains were dashed out. An attacker tried to bite off the genitals, and when that failed he castrated him with a knife, took the genitals in the mouth and handed it to another person who ate it. Another one cut parts of flesh from the buttocks to eat. Then the hearts of the two brothers were cut out and were exhibited for years.

This story about a lynching fits well with the theories of Gustave Le Bon. I already read something about his "La Psychologie des foules" in the book Critical Mass (see older post). Here another translation from the dutch wikipedia about Gustave Le Bon:

Le Bon performed herein (La Psychologie des foules) the view that the individual, even if he is a member of a highly cultured society, in the mass he loses his critical faculties, resulting in primitive and barbaric acts. Such "mass" may consist of a handful of people. In a massive human connection an individual rather acts according to the intelligence of the least intelligent in the group. In the crowd situation, the individual is more gullible and also susceptible to propaganda and mass psychosis. This means that the masses often blindly follow one leader. This phenomenon could also explain the popularity of populist parties and demagogues and the occurrence of lynchings.

This issue remains topical. Lynchings, we have not seen for a while, but always lies in wait. They're always close in hooligan fights. The attacks on aid workers sounds strange but in terms of Le Bon conceivable. The blatantly racist statements by various people, predicts not much good. This theme really speaks to my imagination. The frightening of a group without any concious. And the appeal of such groups to people. I will look if I can design some modern lynchings.

Critical Mass

2010-07-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

The last months I have read Critical Mass (how one thing leads to another) by Philip Ball, very interesting, very inspiring. A few chapters about crowd movements and many models. The first flocking models by "flocking inventor" Craig Reynolds from 1986. "When he used to sit and watch the blackbirds flock in the local cemetery, he began to wonder what rules they were following." Watch (t)his site to know how it works. "So convincing was his software that it was adapted by Hollywood movie-makers for animated special effects such as the swarms of bats in Batman Returns." This kind of animation is called Behaviour Animation. Here an example of an interactive installation using the same flocking model.

After flocking birds and fish, in these models called Boids ("a fusion of 'bird' and sci-fi 'droid'"), Dirk Helbing and Peter Molnar came with a model which shows movement by peoploids. Pedestrians moving along a corridor. Here you see a "fancy" model by VISSIM software using this model.

From these crowd simulations which are made to understand movements you can make a step to crowd simulations which are made to look natural. In Lord of The Ring, where armies of many thousands battle each other, they used Massive. You don't have to animate each warrior because of the use of an artificial intelligence generating system. This software makes it possible to dive visually in the simulations I spoke before. The simulations come to live. You can feel the power of large groups. Here's the Massive showreel. Massive!!!

Noottocht

2010-07-10T00:43:00.000-07:00

This project from the Peergroup and the NNO (Noord Nederlands Orkest) was in our agenda for almost 2 years. That never happened before. The Peergroup and the NNO worked together to create a music theatre play for children aged 10, 11, 12 . Ingredients of the play: an actor (Rogier in ’t Hout ), an actor/puppet-player (Siem van Leeuwen) and of course the NNO orchestra (about 60 musicians). Snow was asked for the video-concept. The first idea was to work with little decors between the orchestra wherein the puppet-player plays parts of the play. The puppets should also travel through the orchestra. We should film these adventures of the puppets with live-cams. The little decors were dropped and replaced by 3d modeled worlds.

I worked with C4D a little before. But this was producing real animated scenes. A pretty nice puppet, which looks very much like the main character, had the lead role. Filmed in front of a greenscreen, he got keyed and placed as a flat movie layer into a C4D world. This world was a dream world, "the world behind the orchestra", landscapes full of instruments.

First we designed the objects in this world by photoshop and placed these flat layers into the 3D world. I designed a lot of trees and did a lot of easy photoshopping cutting because it helps me to survive a heavy time.

Here are some trees.

Here's the part of the animation I made. The strange sound of the music, like an 80's computergame, is due to format, we worked with miditracks made by the NNO.

The rehearsals of the play took place in Donderen at the Peergroup. Without the orchestra. We only had three days to rehearse (in the Oosterpoort) with the orchestra because of the busy time schedule of the NNO. So there was a setup with a lot of chairs but no musicians in one of the bunkers of Donderen.

We played this piece in Groningen, Hoogeveen, Emmen, Meppel, Drachten en Leeuwarden. About 20.000 children saw Noottocht.

A recording of the piece wil follow. You'll find that on the Snow site somewehere in september.

MeTv

2010-07-09T04:06:00.000-07:00

MYCYBORG, creation and reproduction
The extension of the human body with technology today and in the future.
This was the starting point, given by Kees de Groot, to make a work for a presentation at PLANETART Medialab-Artspace Amsterdam. Adri and I decided to work together (huh, strange) on this project. Starting point was the Neurosky MindSet, Adri already bought. What can you do with specific brainwave data? We had earlier thought about that, The man who mistook his wife for a hat. We already know that the different kind of brainwaves you can measure are limited. The MindSet makes calculated brainwave levels and interpreted mental states (currently “attention” and “meditation”) says the MindSet website. We choose meditation as the next starting point. We had a few ideas. But after the lesson of Axel Roch at the RUG the penny dropped. He talked about Nam June Paiks "TV Buddha" (1974).

A closed circuit. This installation IS or this installation is one... A clear meditation state by Buddha, TV and a cam. What happens when you bring the human part in. A human in normal state always brings noise into the system. Let's say, signal distortion by human activity. To reach the state of the original installation, a closed circuit, you have to bring yourself in meditation state in this "reproduction". No noise on the line. You must be Buddha.

We liked the idea of a reproduction. So it realy has to look like the original. Adri took care of the technical implementation. I did the design. Many thanks to Nam June Paik, the "inventor" of video art.

Noorderzon 2010 (part 2)

2010-07-08T15:08:00.000-07:00

Because of the renovation of the Groninger Museum I had to find another place for this "city projections project" by Noorderzon. I was looking for a narrow dark street because I would like to project different faces of people taking a ride on the fair, which takes place at the same time about 500 metres away. I liked the idea of screaming faces in a narrow street. I found a narrow street with a perfect projection wall, the side wall of the Pathe Cinema. I realy liked the wall but the street wasn't realy a creepy place by itself because of all the passing people. So the faces would not realy enhance the atmosphere over there. A few days later I got another idea which has something to do with all these passers. Projecting colored shadows of the passers. But when the shadows reach the edge of the wall they will explode. So this narrow street becomes a place where people losing their shadow.

It's a real challenge, the hardware part as well as the way to make shadows explode. A nice working Max Msp patch to built next month... For the Noorderzon magazine I already made some pictures.

Noorderzon 2010 (part 1)

2010-07-08T14:35:00.000-07:00

For the 20th edition of Noorderzon the organisation wants to give the city of Groningen a special gift. They want a little tour of video-projections through the city. Projections on buildings or behind windows. Snow was asked to think about an projection somewhere in the city.

My first idea, somewhere in March, was a combination of a small intimate photo moment with an enormous public result. At the railway station of Groningen you take a picture of yourself in such a little photo cabine. When you walk outside the station, you see a huge portrait of yourself on the yellow part of the Groninger Museum. After a while your portrait gets much smaller and becomes part of a network of little portraits. The network part is inspired by the Social Cocktails from Frans van Hoesel, but now based on individual facial features. In May I heard about the renovation plans of the Groninger Museum, so this location became problematic. Here are some photo sketches. I had to think about something new.

Tower Inspirations (part 3)

2010-07-08T03:38:00.000-07:00

To knew what's technical possible in the execution of The Tower, we talked a lot with Frans van Hoesel (head at The Centre for High Performance Computing and Visualisation, R.U.G., Groningen). He also wrote a nice sketch in C++, to visualize how to place/organize visitors of The Tower after they left some information about themselves. In this case disguises as cocktails (organized by ingredients).... Here's a video of this little interactive work, NICE!

Tower Inspirations (part 2)

2010-07-06T06:36:00.000-07:00

I ordered the Swarm Catalogue. A realy nice little book about this exhibition. Artists which are inspired by flocking, swarming and crowd movements. All the works shown at this exhibition have this "macro way" of watching. From above, looking at structures and order in a chaotic world. In one way I like the rational approach from a lot of the participating artists. It fits with the idea of research, searching for patterns. But this also results in work without the kind of emotion I'm looking for. Sometimes I would like to dive into some of the works to get closer at the individual parts. Here are some works, the first from Mark Bradford, the second from c.e.b. reas.

Because of the Swarm catalogue I also found some works of Jason Salavon. He does something with filmstrips as well. He's also looking for structures, for patterns, in time, in video time, 25 frames per second... We're looking with an eye at M.J.'s Thriller. Salavons field of research: MTV's 10 Greatest Music Videos of all Time.

Donker (part 2)

2010-07-05T13:11:00.000-07:00

The premiere of Donker (Darkness) is now already 2 months ago. For me the challenge was to make the video-part more easy to play with. I made the "daily impression painter" in Isadora. A painter wich works with a photo database. The idea was that at every city we should play Donker I refresh the database with pictures of the surrounding. In the part of the play which is about memories, I should paint with the tool. I liked the visuals, but only for a short moment. It's something you can use in a VJ show but for a theatre audience it's not interesting.

The second idea to make the video-part more playable was a double flatscreen arrangement, one horizontal and one vertical. Together with a camera. In this setup I placed small objects: model train stuff, dollhouse stuff and other things like leaves, stones etc. I wrote a little story, a strange dream, about the childhood fear of darkness, the search of how things lost there colors and release in general. The story is told in 5 scenes. I used perspex plates to make readymade setups, so I could change easily between scenes. Every scene has its own moving background and bottom visuals. In this very static registration you can see the result until now.

A lovely new work

2010-07-05T12:47:00.000-07:00

I'm not that fanatic blogger, but a post after about three months is a true shame.
But there is a reason for everything and this one is very special.

The birth of our daughter Lou at 02-05-10!

This happy event took every hour for the weeks following.
I saw her grow and change in 2 months. A very nice thing to see, such a small little human. But already such a personality.

In the last three weeks I tried to pick up normal live again and now it's time to write my blog.
I will change the subtitle of my blog (a walk along dailies and ideas) because I don't think I'll ever write dailies... I think "a walk along projects and ideas" fits better.

Donker

2010-03-24T14:43:00.000-07:00

We travel around for almost 2 years with this "music video theatre play" called: "Ik hou van de stad... maar soms produceert het teveel licht." We play this piece with Merel van Dijk (singer), Dennis van Tilburg (electronic musician) and one of us, the Snow guys. Together with dramatist Annemarie Wenzel and drummer Adriaan Groffen we're working on a new play called "Donker".

The play is about apocalyptic fears and a completely dark future. All the different parts: music, text and video are first developed seperated by the makers. We all work with a similar story structure but we first create and experiment by our own thoughts.

I really want to make the video part more "playable". I already develloped a view tools in Isadora: a "daily impression painter", which paints with all kind of pictures. And a blob painter to set the performers, who are in front of one of the videoscreens, in light or darkness. Here are 2 screenshots of the "daily impression painter" at work with some logo's.

I also tried to create some little decors with a view old flatscreens and some miniature stuff. Here I can play with different finger camera's and different kinds of background / bottom movies. Make things dark with some old lightsources, computer flatscreens, strange. Pictures will follow.

Icarus

2010-03-23T15:17:00.000-07:00

Snow was asked to make the video concept for the theatre play Icarus by the Peergroup. A play directed by Floris van Delft. With two actors: Wolter Muller and Niels Croiset. The play inspired by black box recordings of crashed airplanes, and one of the biggest airplane disasters ever on Tenerife in 1977. Here you can find some of those black box recordings, weird and scarry.

We used 3 flatscreens, two old TV monitors, one usb cam and two finger camera's (hidden in a pilot headset). The two old TV monitors were only used for the visualisation of the jet engines which the actors (now pilots) can start and stop by a video player. The usb cam was used in the opening scene where the pilots were playing the Tenerife disaster with toy planes, like little childeren on the ground. The headset finger cameras were used in the final scene, to give close up shots from the pilots, who flew their final meet... The flatscreens were used as a cockpit window, a cockpit board computer, a message screen and filmscreen.

Here a quick photo slideshow, photos by Peter Rillema.

Something that started as a simple and easy to operate play on festivals, turned out in a very technical one. About 130 audio cues, 60 light cues and 30 video cues. But it still looks easy and spontaneously. So, that's nice.

You can watch the play at De Parade:
Rotterdam: 17 t/m 20 juni
Utrecht: 22 t/m 27 juli
Amsterdam: 17 t/m 22 augustus

Some screenshots:

Cold War

2009-12-14T05:26:00.000-08:00

For the first presentation from the Peergroup at Donderen, an old military base for ammunition storage, I build an bomb launch pad. This interactive video installation was based on the theme Cold War. In one of the about 20 buidings at this area I placed a video screen and a pilar with a big red button on it. Visitors of the presentation walked by this place when they arrived and when they left. They see this red button and the bomb on a launch pad on the videoscreen. Curiosity makes the visitor walk to this building and maybe push the button.

For me it was the first project using Max MSP and Arduino. Max to play the 2 different movies (1 loop of the bomb on the platform, 1 video of the lift off) and to give a signal to the Arduino board for ringing the phone. The Arduino board receives a message from the big red button by pushing it and send it to Max. The arduino receives a message from Max (5 times) to open the relay, the phone gets power, it rings and lights up by 9 led lights. The phone uses 9V AC to ring. The leds needs DC power so Marcel, my classmate with electronic brains, built this AC - DC converter with 9 leds. Now I only had to use a 9V AC adapter to power the phone. Thank you very much Marcel! And of course Jan for helping me out in this first Max patch.

Here some photos of the situation at daylight, strrrange place.....

Noord Nederlands Filmfestival 2009

2009-11-16T13:01:00.000-08:00

Another Nou en Herkauw experiment. The philosophy behind the Nou en Herkauw veejay shows is to start from nothing and create all the video-material during the video performance. For example with stopmotion animations, video buffering (short video samples), sms tools, a bluetooth photo/video visualizer, etc.

For the Noord Nederlands Filmfestival party in the Harmonie we used the Nou en Herkauw philosophy even for the musical part. We asked our friend Dennis van Tilburg to use all his midi tools together with AbletonLive and built a piece of music out of samples. Together with singer Merel van Dijk, keys player Laurens van der Meulen and drummer Adriaan Groffen, Dennis built an one hour music piece. Soundscape, jazz, dance and noise came together in an improvisation/jamm.

For the visualisations we brought some new tools: "visualisation speakers" which use the resonance of the music to create moving images. We had a lot of small boxes filled with liquid, beads, beans, corn starch, etc. to place on this speakers. And a dictation tool to create text graphics by speaking.

The theme we used as a handhold was Sound = Vision, inspired by an old movie about cymatics. An almost religious approximation of sound. Curious? Watch here.

The Nou en Herkauw performance was brought by 12 performers. An anthill wich spit music and visuals with a very nice kind of energy. One day after this performance I went to George Clinton and Parliament, the master of FUNK. I count 19 performancers on stage... damn! Very inspiring for the next Nou en Herkauw Sound = Vision show. I think we realy need a funky dresser!!!

At last, equipment.

Tower inspirations

2009-11-09T01:18:00.000-08:00

For me one of the most intresting things of The Tower is the organisation of (the movies from) the scanned visitors. In some way I like to watch to groups of people and their movements. Attract and repel by individuals causes group formation: small groups or masses wich seem to act like one big organism. Like other species in nature (for example fishes who form a school in a dangerous situation) we are able to act as one in specific situations. In former video installations Snow played with the idea of people's movements, for example GoodLife_RMX.

But also a photoprint (350 x 135 cm) wich shows the movements of people on the Grote Markt in a filmstrip format.

In 2003 I saw something very inspiring on The Venice Biennale. Work of Michal Rovner.

And in 2007 I saw The Second Person of Crystal Pite by the Nederlands Dans Theater. Because I had one of these cheap and so very high seats, I had a beatifull view on the group movements of the 24 dancers.

Googlin' around I found some interesting things. Here some wikepedia information. The group movement of animals can be qualified by the term swarming. Flocking is the term usually used for swarming behaviour in birds, while shoaling or schooling refers to swarming behaviour in fish. A group of people can also exhibit swarm behaviour, such as soldiers swarming over the parapets. In Cologne, Germany, two biologists from the University of Leeds demonstrated a flock like behaviour in humans. The group of people exhibited a very similar behavioural pattern to that of a flock, where if five percent of the flock would change direction the others would follow suit. If one person was designated as a predator and everyone else was to avoid him, the flock behaved very much like a school of fish. The mathematical modelling of flocking behaviour is a common technology, and has found uses in animation.

Here you can read more about the research of Professor Krause (huh?) from the University of Leeds.

I also found an exhibition called Swarm. I ordered the catalogue to know why artists are interested in this phenomenon. To be continued.

Nyman, The Sequel

2009-11-03T13:18:00.000-08:00

We dropped the EEG way to control video. At first it didn't match with the subject of the opera, the case of Dr.P.: visual agnosia or "mental blindness" due to damage of the visual parts of the brain. EEG equipment doesn't say anything about these visual parts of the brain. Second, the singer in the role of Dr.P. has to wear these sensors (electrodes) during the play, wich gives a very strong look of a labaratory or mental hospital. This doesn't match the way Oliver Sacks examine his patient Dr.S.

We visited the Biological Centre of the RUG to do some tests with this EEG equipment. I think this technique is very interesting to use in a video installation... Perhaps, sometime in the future.

We made a "3 screen" stage design wich gives an impression of the visual perception of Dr.P., all seperate components. Impossible to experience a total view.

For the videoplan we used the disease stage of Dr.P. From a realistic- to an abstract- to an, in the end, chaotic perception. In the middle of the play we start a presentation wich gives information about visual perception in generally.

We used a mask over a 3 screen wide video (3 x 720 = 2160 x 576). In Isadora we devide this very widescreen video over 3 beams.

Here is a small video report and some pictures of the final performances in The Grand Theatre, Groningen, 27th and 28th of october.

Cinekid 2009, 15 t/m 23 oct 2009

2009-11-03T04:44:00.000-08:00

For the second year we brought our Nou & Herkauw Vj/Dj circus to Cinekid. This time we used the theme Children's farm. The idea and the design for this theme came from the students of the Academy for Popculture: Willemein, Richard en Gerrald. They developped it originally for the Island Festival, wich should take place in september 2009, but was cancelled.

At the Nou & Herkauw veejay boerderij (children's farm) kids can produce there own stopmotion animations at one of the 6 animation laptops. They can use every material they want to make their movies, for example a black- and whiteboard, a lightbox, a lot of magazines to cut and paste, etc. When the stopmotion movie is ready, the movie is automatically send to the VJ computer. With a nice, kidsproof, videomixer (Midi controller) and a touchscreen the kids can mix their own movie with other movies and put effects on it. Besides the VJ computer there is the DJ computer. On the touchscreen you can choose songs to mix with other songs (and because Ableton is behind it, the mix always sounds nice). The VJ's and DJ's make their own "5 minutes of fame" show, shown on a 4 x 3 mtr screen and to listen to on 2 speakers.

The mix is captured for 1 minute and is, together with the original stopmotion movie, uploaded to the Cinekid server. This makes it possible for the kids to show their own work to everybody by visiting the Cinekid site with their login code. Nice!

Check some mixes here.

For me very usefull Applescripts / folderscripts to automate some actions:

1. To send files automatically from a "saving" folder on a computer to the "collecting" folder on another computer:

At first find the path to the "collecting" folder by the following command in Scripteditor: choose folder
Then copy paste the path in the following script:

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving these_items

tell application "Finder" to duplicate these_items to folder alias "Ruben:Desktop:collecting folder:"

end adding folder items to

Put this script in: Library:Scripts:Folder Action Scripts and then add this script as a folder action to your "saving" folder by right clicking on the folder -> more -> enable folder actions.

2. To tell an application (in this case IsadoraCore) that there is a new file in a folder (in this case the "collecting" folder) to load:

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving these_items

try

tell application "IsadoraCore"

import media into document 1 from these_items

end tell

on error msg

display dialog "Error importing file into Isadora: " & msg

end try

end adding folder items to

Here an graphical overview of the setup:

At last a picture of a stranded farmer. Problems with the Snow tractor when cruisin' the countryside.

The Tower

2009-09-11T07:15:00.000-07:00

We (Snow) are thinking about / working on an interactive video installation called The Tower. The idea for this work came about three years ago. Here's a link to the Retort++ site (by NP3), where you can find some background information. Or you can download a pdf file here. Unfortunately the text is only in dutch at the moment. In this blog you will find our walk to final implementation, ja ja.

The man who mistook his wife for a hat by Michael Nyman

2009-09-11T06:02:00.000-07:00

An opera produced by Prime, played in the Grand Theatre in Groningen, October 27th and 28th.

Snow is asked to develop the video concept of this opera. We want to use some interactive video. At first Prime asked us to do something with EEG equipment wich can read brainwaves. The singers have to wear this electrodes during the play. We don't know yet what to do with this brainwave data, we first have to know what kind of data this EEG machine gives us. We don't want to show the basic graphs. To be continued.

11 sep 2009

2009-09-11T04:51:00.000-07:00

A nice date to built something new. A blog for instance. In this blog I'll start to make an overview of personal interests, ideas, artwork and projects i'm working on.

You can also visit Snow at Myspace or the Snow website