Site Specific Performance

Hello there,

It is the eve of our Site Specific Performance, and i can exclusively reveal, that it is about George Africanus ( i doubt anyone will look at this between now and tomorow so the suprise hopefully wont be spoilt)

I have completed my preparations for it tonight, i have finished the script for my section and have also made some flyers and printed them off to hand out at the end of our performance. They are just a bit of fun, and will hopefully give people something to think about after they leave.

The idea centres around finding Georges bloodline, its yet to be traced to this day so i came up with the notion of doing a film like poster, as a sequel to the Da Vinci Code.

Sadly i didnt think of this till it was too late to use it as an advertisement, otherwise it would have been a good promotional tool

Anyway here are the few designs i created, i went for the black one in the end as i feel it stands out head and shoulders above the white versions (poster positive descrimination alert!)

I created these using Flash, i traced over the picture of George and then just added some basic text, i played around with different colours and fill effects until finding results i was happy with.

So tomorow is the day of reckoning so to speak, i hope all goes well, its been a good experience thus far, i'll update you on the results tomorow

Farewell for now....

Christian Marclay - Video Quartet

Evening all, over the christmas holidays i decided to visit the Tate Modern gallery in London with my girlfriend. It was an interesting experience, i find the majority of displays there to be completly ludicrous and pretentious beyond belief however in a darkened room tucked away at the back of one of the halls i stumbled across a tremendous piece by a man called Christian Marclay.

Entitled 'Video Quartet' it is 4 large screens each playing footage of music performances from popular films. Each screen has different clips and no two screens ever have the same clip running at the same time, its kinda hard to explain but sitting there in front of these giant screens i was mesmerised for 10 minutes. They are so well edited together that its almost as if they were designed to be heard that way, the mixture of sounds is awesome one minute you'll have 4 quaint slow piano solos then all of a sudden like a wave of noise crashing down the images will turn to full orchestras booming out majestically. It really is a fascinating piece and i urge anyone with an interest in music and/or video editing to seek it out and watch it if they have the chance.

Site Specific Performance

Greetings, back to normal course related stuff now. Weve recently been set a task by Arty/Performancy/Media man Dominic Shaw to produce a site specific performance. We have been put into groups and each given a person to base our performance around. The person we have been given is George Africanus.

Today we had a meeting to bring together our research findings and decide on an idea. We came up with a pretty cool idea for our performance but i dont want to give anything away so you'll have to attend to see what it turns out like!

After the meeting Glyn and I went on a location hunting trip, we looked at two churches that were relevant to George, St Peter's Church is where he was married and St Mary's Church is where he is buried.

Here are some images of the churches that i took today...



























I'm enjoying this project and am pleased that all of my group is enthusiastic about it. Hopefully our idea will come to life just as we plan and it will be a successful performance. I think things like this are really helpful to me as they encourage me to think outside of the box and just be as creative as i can, its always been something ive found hard thinking of ideas but tasks like this can only help me. I'll update you on the progress of our performance after the next meeting, farewell till then!

Educating the Masses Part 1 - Lewis Taylor

Hello, for my next installment i have decided to focus on something thats not at all related to my course. Its just part of me, in the faint hope of anyone reading this blog i thought it would be a good oppurtunity to educate readers in what i beleive to be the finest music known to man. Hopefully people will like it, be open minded and just give it a try you never know!



I'll start by presenting a run down of my favorite albums week by week, the first installment in this musical lesson is......

Lewis Taylor - Lewis Taylor (1996)

Lewis Taylor is a multi instrumentalist and singer/songwriter from Barnet,England. Quite simply this man is a genius, his music is rather hard to describe its extremely influenced by soul but equally by classic rock and even the beach boys have been cited as a key influence. This album released in 1996 is his self titled debut, critically acclaimed and a commercial failure. Lewis plays every instrument sings every vocal track and has a hand in the production of every aspect of the album. Its a magnificent piece of work, dark and atmospheric with heavy baselines and complex layered harmonies. I cannot find words to describe just how highly i rate this album, unclassifiable yet incomparable genius, this album is quite hard to come across these days so i have provided a link below for one of my favorite tracks on the album, entitled 'Damn'. I hope you enjoy


Damn

GooTube Conspiracy

Hello everyone and wishing you a happy new year!

For my first post of the new year i thought i would take a break from the academic related things and inform you of this interesting channel ive found on YouTube. It is called the GooTube Conspiracy and it all started with a man called 'Nalts' posting a video comment about YouTube being sold to Google, he was quite critical about this and it lead to a series of follow on movies of how google and youtube had teamed up and were out to get him, the interesting part of it all is that other YouTube users have contributed along the way creating a sort of interactive ever changing story. I think this is a really creative use of YouTube and the potential for similar projects in the future is huge.

Take a look at this season one recap, season two is about to start shortly and anyone can contribute so if you enjoy what you see maybe you could be part of the ever evolving GooTube Conspiracy...

Ere Be Dragons!

Towards the end of last term we had some seminars from the people behind a game called 'Ere Be Dragons'. It is an interactive game that utilises GPS technology to give its user a unique experience. I found it a very interesting and encouraging experience to actually talk to someone who has left university and found relative success in their chosen industry, theres hope for me yet godammit!



Here is a link to the group behind 'Ere Be Dragons' website

http://www.i-am-ai.net/home.html


Theres some fascinating stuff on this site, the company Active Ingredient have many projects on display and are clearly a very talented bunch of people. I like the general style of the website, they way everything is drawn with a pencil before your eyes. Check out the play section where you can draw onto a background and save what you come up with for other people to see, very cool feature!


In the seminars we had with the people from this company we were encouraged to create ideas for our own interactive game. Myself and Will came up with an idea for a kind of treasure hunt game that you can play in your own house using GPS technology in the same way as 'Dragons'. I found this quite a useful lesson as it was good to sit down and just come up with something off the top of my head and then talk to someone who has actually done this for real. We were told how this would be possible to implement properly and its good to know that technology like this is out there and getting better all the time.

National Space Centre - Leicester

Recently a course trip to the National Space Centre in Leicester was organised, it was a good oppurtunity to observe multimedia exhibitions working and to see how people interact with them.

There were many different kinds of multimedia on display but the common denominator was that it was all interactive in some way. Whether it be as simple as pressing a button for an informative video to play or as complicated as a device telling you how scared you are of certain images by you placing your hand on a sensory pad, you could interact with pretty much everything in the centre.

The main attraction at the centre is a 360 degree cinema which shows 3d animated movies, this is an extremely impressive feature and at times the 360 degree environment can you make you feel as if you are actually staring right into space or looking back at the earth. I enjoyed this very much and would recommend anyone to go and see it, not only is it really cool i actually learned quite a bit too about a fascinating subject that is space and the universe.

An interactive display that i liked was one where you had to put your hand on a sensor pad and then look at a series of images. Once you had looked at all the photos it gave you results and told you which image you reacted to most strongly. I thought this was quite interesting and used a nice mixture of technology and human interaction.







Now moving on to a display that i disliked, this was a game where you looked into a webcam which took your photo then imported it onto the screen in front of you. After pressing a series of seemingly meaningless buttons you were sposed to be transformed into an alien, but when that happened it didnt appear to have any relation to original photo. Basically it just stuck a random comptuer generated head of an alien where my picture had been, i thought this was poor and i went away feeling that it was a poor display that i wasted my time on, it tried to be too complicated and just generally didnt work.

So that concludes my feelings on the space centre trip, an interesting day out. If i'm being honest i didnt learn that much about Multimedia but i did learn some fascinating facts about the universe.

Farewell and Have a Nice Day

David Walker