Ethereal Media Art Installation; the event of a thread

Currently on at the armory park Wade Thompson Drill Hall is a larger than life media art textile installation by the distinguished cross media artist Ann Hamilton. 

Its deeply reminiscent of Christo's hanging curtain in appearance and sentiment with some significant differences. Ann's work is a multi-sensory experience for viewers to the work, as it brings together readings, sound, and live events 

"within a field of swings that together invite visitors to connect to the action of each other and the work itself, illuminating the experience of the singular and collective body. At the end of each day, a vocalist on the drill hall’s balcony serenades the pigeons as they are released to flight. Each day’s song is cut with a record lathe, and the resulting recording is played back the next day."

The following documenting video gives a better understanding of the interaction of the wash of the parasol as it sweeps up and down by people moving back an forth on the suspended swings, thus triggering spectacular entertainment for all within the armory space.

"Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large scale, multi-media installations. Responsive to the contingencies of the sites where they are made – cloth, texts spoken and written, animals, and people suspended or in motion – her installations immerse viewers in a poetic at once visceral and literary." Source

Mimic, Unreal Frenetic Experimental Animation

Creative photographers and video producers are just simply inspired by abandoned buildings and spaces, none more so then completely empty ones. Thus Lucio Arese has used a wasted cattle market building as a raw background in his blindingly fast exploding audio visual mayhem and chaos of computer graphic manifolds.

"the film rides the verge between nonsense, random noise and organic, structured audiovisual events, enhancing the plastic clashes of a digital inserted foreground into an old and rusty environment." and is "Humorous, lunatic, cartoonish, nightmarish, Mimic is an attempt to reach a complete unity between music and motion picture in an epoch of violent changes."

The media art video as can be seen after the jump may cause one to think that Lucio has managed to capture some frenetically motivated anti-matter, albeit in the form of computer rendered  motion graphics.

Compressed 02, An Eerie media art composition

Kim Pimmel has created an ingenious motion graphic animation of soap bubbles being traced in with exotic ferrofluid liquid becoming attracted to an exotic spherical neodymium magnet.

Ferrous printer toner particles floating on the surface of water are attracted by the invisible forces of capillary action and magnetism around them, and the patterns and motions that result are strangely ordered and organized!

Kim achieved this by shooting some time lapse sequences with her Nikon D90, 60mm macro lens and custom built intervalometer, edited it with Adobe Premiere, and succinctly turned her video work into a groovy media art work by using a music composition application, Ableton Live.

Health risks imbued by Climate change and Flying Pollen

"Climate change–related increased burden of disease, specifically from allergy and asthma, is anticipated because of changes in the distribution, quantity, and quality of pollen, and lengthening of the pollen season. Asthma and allergic disease will also likely be worsened because of interaction between heavier pollen loads and increasing air pollution from natural and man-made sources.  People with allergy and asthma may expect worsening disease, more days with symptoms, and reduced quality of life as a result of these environmental changes."

Quick, go grab your decongestant spray since the ensuing exquisite media art piece de resistance may either spontaneously trigger a tickling sneeze, or merely lightly entertain and educate our awareness of its delirious outcome in our global warming world.

Fabrice Mathieu filmed Flying Pollen in slow motion at 50 frames per second using his Canon 550D 18-55mm, 100-300mm with a shrilling zinging sound design.



While this charming slow motion video beautifully illustrates the dispersion of flying pollen we may need to reflect on Scott Browns climate progress analysis, of the health allergies associated with early and more pronounced flying pollen. This nevertheless appears likely to result in an unanticipated boom in decongestant pharmaceuticals.

Time: an enticing conceptual media art piece

Albert Einstein once famously remarked that "The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once."

Thus time is everywhere but no where all at once unless time is described as a duration; In that space, time travels a distance between two points.

Jeffrey Janusheske entertains us with his analogous metaphor for the meaning of time by prying his conceptual media art piece from Einstein's theory "that time is another dimension, woven together with space to form a malleable fabric that is distorted by matter."

While the piece holds us to a period of circumspection, I don't believe anyone will ever be able to enclose the concept of time as Jeffrey attempts to do here, except to say, without his creative sound design, the time spent watching it might offer no illusion to its materialism, however illusive it remains.

Time Lapse of the Seattle Space Needle

is a superbly cool time lapse cinematic video, by Filmmaker, Director and teacher Phillip Bloom, shot from a 17th floor room of the Warwick Hotel aerially taking in the Seattle Space Needle tower and surrounding panoramic airspace.

He created this remarkably clever piece of cinematic media art from 150, 000 photo stills and slickly achieved his finished entertaining piece with astonishing sensitivity to motion, story, light and drama selectively adding a musical work of James Newton Howard's from The Happening.



Among the array of equipment he used, was the Canon 5DmkII, T2i, T3i and Panasonic GH2 cameras, and in order to block out reflections from windows, he used the Delkin lensskirt suction camera mount, plus the whole work was color corrected with Magic Bullet software.

Should you be feeling inspired, Phillip succinctly guide's your appreciation of his work in a 21 minute Soundcloud commentary of it, here.

The Big Ship

is by Carlton Bright a freelance videographer, who reflected upon a composition by Brian Eno from the late 1970's of the same name.

According to Carlton, the video;
"slowly evolved, and it lent itself to some kind of "evolving" thing.. in this case an evolving thing going through space.. but a natural thing, not a man made thing.."

and

"The video was made on a shoestring budget, using household materials, such as aluminum foil with holes poked in it for the stars, carved Styrofoam, clay, a floodlight, a clothesline and a sliding door frame, talcum powder, and a few other things.. I had just lost my lease to my studio, so I had to make it in my 10"x 13" bedroom, and ironically, I think the limitations kept the thing from getting too complicated. ."



The gliding panoramic motion of the media art work, tends to captivate and entertain (like many an interesting video), wishing it were longer, not unlike, many of the cool ambient works of Brian Eno.

Black Liquid; abstract media art

Dimitry Zakharov is a practicing video producer and designer that creates amazingly entertaining animations and videos by using 3D and 4D Cinema software's. Black Liquid is a fluently evocative abstract stop motion animation that swings forms and shapes around the picture plane, sometimes collapsing and reforming shapes and then ripping them apart with heaps of fluid dexterity.

The animation holds our attention by the synchronized pulses and smoothly tuneful play of the sound design from coresplittaz, which turns this short moment of fluidic joy into a handsome media art package.

Opening up a wormhole shooting at 2,564 frames per second.

Director of Photography, Cinematographer and Editor , Tom Guilmette was given a high speed Phantom Flex, Rule Boston video camera to shoot the fast and mentally demanding World Championships of Ping Pong (WCPP), in a way that was never before seen.

"The most surprising thing about the new Flex camera is its light sensitivity and native noiseless 1000 ISO. Dave and I were able to record 600 FPS under Rule office fluorescent ceiling lights! The picture was not perfectly exposed, but we were making flicker-free images at that insane frame rate. If you are not familiar with high speed, a ton of light is needed and flicker is almost always a problem. But this camera is the most sensitive yet. The new Flex is “simply magic”. I think I said that to Dave more than once at Rule."

To familiarize himself with the Flex camera, Tom shot a bunch of test footage's in his locked Las Vegas hotel room and together with some of his friends created an insanely entertaining media art piece by editing in, sped up and slowed sound bytes, overlaid with some wild percussion, resulting in a punctually satisfying sound design.

Hence in his minds eye slow-motion video, below, Tom believes he is "Violating the laws of nature. Playing God. Capturing stuff we are not suppose to see. Potentially opening up a wormhole in the fabric of time." Nevertheless a suspension and a collapse of space time all at once, huh?

Macro Kingdom; enhanced microcosmic media art

Clemens Wirth does some really entertaining and engaging macro and microscopic photography and videography of unseen microcosms from within an unseen universe that bind us together.

He brings to life, forms, shapes and ideas from a world we are aware of but rarely have the opportunity to see.

Macro Kingdom, is part 3 of his creative vision, an ongoing project poem of the scaled down infinite world made ever more so memorable by sounds, created from found objects by the sound design of Radium Audio and vocals by Melanie Pappenheim.

Unreal Stop-Motion Animation: Meta

is a graduation media art project designed and directed by Jurriën Boogert and is a masterpiece of contrived suspended anticipatory entertainment.

The work is likely made with some kinds of unspecified 3D and stop motion animation software's, with beautifully composed sound design.

The Formula, a fractal math journey

Tom Beddard has created inspiring and entertaining landscape animation from a Mandelbulb, which is a 3D version of the Mandelbrot fractal. He has made it "with a GLSL shader that uses the GPU to raytrace the fractal's mathematical surface - no polygons or models - it exists purely in mathematical space!"

Although Tom refers to this work as a music video collaboration with 'The Formula', I view it as another mighty fine example of media art, that is where and or when audio and moving images work in complete synchronous symphony and harmony.

Breathtaking Media Art Animation: One Rat Short

absolutely stunning and entertaining short story produced and directed by Alex Weil ....

is a very moving mix of visual f/x, music, sound design and story.......

from creative design studio, Charlex.

Ametsub's Repeatedly

Designed, directed and produced in Turin and Milan by Lucio Arese, Repeatedly is the official video of Ametsub's new single released by Mille Plateaux, on the The Nothings of the North album.

Lucio Arese created this entertaining media art film by deploying experimental stop motion animation techniques, in order to create artificial mapping topologies of various 3D and virtual geometric shapes. These forms were used to represent the various glitches in harmonic and rhythmic residua structures of the music, itself giving rise to a neatly formed audio video synchronization.

Interesting to note that almost every frame of the video becomes a digital sculpture blended into the urban landscape, go here to view them.



Ametsub has one of the coolest musician websites I've experienced for some time !

Paper craft animation: The Move by Mandy Smith

is a charming short story animation inspired by moving in Amsterdam, illustrated through paper. It is a subtly sublime piece of entertainment made ever more enjoyable, by the quaint nature of Mandy Smith's delicate paper sculpture constructions and set designs. The  cool music and sound design from Lawrence Horne, Piers Burbrook de Vere and Jeremy Yang, works a jovial treat.

Mandy Smith's, media art is subtle and complex yet seductively simple and cute, visit her website, to view her clever paper craft skills.

Credits
Direction and Art Direction/ Mandy Smith
DOP/ Ties Versteegh
Stunt Co-ordinator/ Lars Siemens
Online Artist/ Daisy Hulsken
Grading/ Rachel Stone
Post Production/ The Ambassadors

Amon Tobin's "Esther"

I have to admit to having been a fan of Amon Tobin's music for about 10 years and "Esther" continues to convey his impressive creative power of at times unnerving tunes !

Charles De Meyer,(aka Chuck Eklectric), an up-and-coming Belgian director, first met Amon Tobin in 2007 just after the release of his Foley Room album, and proposed his idea for a short film for the song. 

This very creepy sci-fi snake robot animation with a dramatized romantic twist is a mind-blowing experiment with narrative live action, with superlative modeling and rendering. All the details in the 3D snake robot and near perfect synchronization with the music makes this a frighteningly entertaining media art experience.



Amon Tobin's website has giveaways and a brand new release to mark the occasion of this, his official videoclip of Esther.

Related post of Amon Tobin, here.

The River: atmospherically riveting short film

Is an emotively entertaining short piece of superb stop-motion animation that firmly cements a new genre of film making into the mainstream of media art; created with the geeky favored toy box of Lego bricks, together with some cleverly orchestrated handmade visual and software effects.

Although captured on a Nikon D40x and authored in Final Cut Pro, the technical skill used to display large amounts of artwork is in the use value of treating Legos like clay.

The River won the best cinematography category of the bricks in motion 2009 star competition in which Nikolas Jaegar provides us with an alluring example of what can be achieved using technically astute Diy effects.

The underlying theme bears some semblance of a story, requisite with the history of the American Civil War, however bear in mind though The River has got an existential kick to it.

"A lot of people have asked me about the plot. I'll say that some parts are more clear than others, and that's really my intention. I don't want it to be a film where you reach the ending and go "oh, THAT's what was going on", not at all."



Both the film and music is by Nikolas Jaeger, with voices from Leonardo Liccini, Erik Wiedenmann and David Wardell, and Civil War sound effects provided by Phil Sepulveda.

Bad Things That Could Happen by This Is It

is an entertaining little video with amazing set design using giant props made out of cardboard about bad things that could happen.

"The film is self explanatory made up of seven short scenes. Playing with scale and bringing objects to life, the film creates a subverted world where the mundane becomes absurd."



This Is It, is a collective of illustrators, animators, artists and designers, who are: Andy Baker, Laura Bird, Rose Blake, Daniel Britt, Chan An Gee, Michael Knight, Nicos Livesey, Tom McCaughan, Azusa Nakagawa, Joseph Pelling and Becky Sloan

Credits of the work
Cinematography - Hugo Donkin
Photography - Thomas Bolwell
Sound Design - Andrew Kinnear
Music - Andrew Kinnear & Joseph Pelling
Make Up - Elizabeth Barlow

Apart from the cool constructive effort of this sweet little film, I'm intrigued as to know when a film is not a video ? Nevertheless, I for one have a propensity here in this blog to view this kind of work as nothing short of a mighty fine piece of Media Art !

Body Code: Unreal molecular movement at the sub-cellular level

Mind boggling abstract surreal computer graphic simulations of cellular activity on the microscopic and molecular scale offers intriguing viewing.

The video here is an edited compilation of complimentary medical science animations of the molecular movements of sub-cellular activity that are happening every second of our lives within our bodies.

This media art show-reel was specifically designed for museum and art gallery presentation with the goal of reaching public audiences who do not usually seek out or are exposed to the details of scientific knowledge.

This profoundly compelling animation was created by Drew Barry, the almost hypnotizing sound design by Francois Tetaz and the time lapse Mitosis by Professor Jeremy Pickett-Heaps.

Cool 3D light projection video mapping experience

At the recently held Mobile World Congress new media agency Superbein demonstrated an experience based video mapping 3D projection with coordinated light on a 3D surface. Viewers were invited to step into a sensory cube to discover what Alcatel-Lucent envisions for its customers.



The designers used standard projectors and some kind of 3D mapping software to project the moving image on to none rectilinear surfaces. The music track likely ensnares one's imagination whist engulfed in the immersive experience of the cube.