Creative Licensing

You may have noticed the Creative Commons license on the site but don't know much about the movement. Well, now there is a fun video that explains it all:


click to view the video

Commentary

click to view clip

I have been shown the truth...Mac's do rock. Being a PC user forever I never understood why Mac users were so die-hard...until Anne showed me how easy it is to make video on them. A few clicks and the footage from my digital camera was converted and compressed into a nice, tiny clip.

I must get one.

This is something we put together as the result of me playing around with iMovie. The footage was taken from my FujiFilm A200, editted on an iMac with the commentary laid over it in iMovie

The sound might be a bit low. We are working out the kinks of this low tech approach as we go.

This vlogging is terribly addictive, I want to sample and re-sequence everything I see...change it, re-order it, re-create it.

Trouble With Vlogging

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Damn that D. for beating me to the punch!

This experiment was made with my Fujifilm A200 (same model as D.) and I overlaid the audio by speaking into my Mac's internal mic (not the best way to get voice, but it suffices for this example) and smoothing it out with Audacity. The editing and compression was done through iMovie - simple to use and gets the job done.

This is mostly what D. looks like lately - working away furiously at his computer(s), swearing and smoking and muttering. Once in a while, I sneak up and bite him but he is oblivious. He is "in the zone".

First VLog

Well, after a lot of cussing and fuming, I have something that I am proud to submit as my first vlog.



click to view clip

I spent more time trying to get another clip working, but for the sake of my sanity I had to walk away from that for the day. Once I get that clip together it's posting will contain the trials and tribulations required to make it happen.

This clip was created with my FujiFilm A200 Digit Camera. The two clips were put together and the fades were via MovieMaker, saved as an AVI. Then Adobe Premiere (which I am sorry, but truly sucks!!!) added the audio track (2 tracks with a fade)...then exported to a MOV.

The clip will be posted to archive.org, but I was impatient, so I posted on another server for now.

Phone/Sex/Video

I've been thinking about cellphones since I read Cellular Phones As Sexual Objects And Human Implosion by Emily Lacy

The cell phone represents a human desire to connect with others, to be sexual and capable of sex anywhere. There are no boundaries anymore; we can talk 'til the end of the world. I am continually confronted with my sexuality because the cell phone is a signifier of my sexual and social life, which has now become somehow more unbearably "endless". The portability of the phone allows for a constant intercourse of communication, and it is done via a machine.

Now, I want a cellphone.


Encoded Presence [auto-portrait of E. Puente]
Michael Takeo Magruder [02.2005]

Michael Takeo uses a smartphone to create lo-tech video portraits of his subjects and releases the results in three formats: standard computer, PDA and Smartphone. The resulting video is highly pixelated. I'm not sure that I like the standard computer version (the image is blown up and there is an annoying audio component in both the standard computer and PDA versions) but the smartphone version works on my computer (Mac) and is truer to the source.

...Generating transitory and ephemeral networks, the mobile phone mediates our most intimate of communications and exchanges – at all times and in all places – and continues to erode the actual and perceived divisions between public and private space.

Within this technological and sociological framework, there exists the potential to implement this medium as a mechanism to explore, critique and expand the conceptual and aesthetic structures within the classical genre of portraiture...

Without artistic direction/interference and utilising only a SVP c500 smartphone as a recording instrument, a subject was requested to generate cinematic content interpreting the notion of ‘auto-portrait’. From the resulting material a single nine second audio/video stream was extracted and utilised as the exclusive source material for the artwork.

Digitize Me

How much of ourselves can we break down into IP packets and disperse into the ethernet?

Does it change us, diminish us or does it allow us to experience new facets of ourselves and others?

I will strive to showcase, sample and comment on evolving technologies that change the way we communicate and express ourselves.

The documentation of a vlog from the ground-up starting lo-tech will be one area that I hope to further digitize myself.

A Short Introduction...

Chat, email, telephone, bulletin board, blog. We use technology to form and maintain relationships between dispersed flesh bodies. We are cyborgs, extending our reach via cables and wi-fi, creating the internet as we surf.

As an artist, my function on this site will be to explore ways in which artists use technology in order to interact, communicate and collaborate. I am particularly interested in online projects that explode concepts of authorship and limited editions. Isn't a limited edition DVD an oxymoron?