Noah Gunther and I, founders of the art collective Scientists Against Time (info coming soon), decided to combine efforts in the spirit of Digitalism (info coming soon) and create a collaborative video, noise, and performance piece. We took Marshall McLuhan's ideas about the growing age of digital technology, specifically Allatonceness (the globalization and interconnectivity of the world thereby ceasing previous notions of linear time and space), but spun it in more of a metaphorical way. The performance, entitled Pepperoni Beer Donuts, intended to represent this onslaught of information and connection between all time and space in the form of rapidly changing video (neo-Dada random- and meaningless-ness, if you will), computer generated noise, and human made noise. Thanks to the computer-level brains of Noah, much of the most interesting parts of the audio came from importing raw data from computer programs, templates, pictures, and other files into Audacity, a free audio-editing software, and exporting it as an audio file. This produces sounds such as this. It is very fun and we can teach you how to do it if you just ask!
Here's the video and noise piece we created:
And here's a clip from the performance on 3/16/15 (full video coming soon):
Final remarks: I very much enjoyed this term in New Media in Art. I experimented with a lot of things and felt like I could express myself more than any other art class I've taken at Lawrence and use media I'm most interested in. I also learned a lot from John and the other students in the class. I'm excited to be in the intermediate course next term!
This may be one of the most ambitious projects i've ever seen in this class, and it came off as being effortless. The Scientists Against Time (SAT) aesthetic is rock solid. An assault of crap coming off as Pure Beauty. Hope SAT can play some parties or maybe the festival circuit. Get some white lab coats in case you get pelted with tofu wraps though...
ReplyDeleteTeach me! I want to have fun! I also want to get pelted with tofu wraps!
ReplyDeleteRidley, your thing with Noah was awesome and reminded me so much of John Cage's thing on that television program
ReplyDeletei was thinking about that John Cage performance too. i wish we had more random things to bang on
DeleteReminded me of a performance we did in the 1990s at Iowa. We had a group called f64. I believe 5 of us created a number of works over a few year's time. The first piece was Toast Piece. We set up like I see above -- very seriously working on the task of putting hundreds of white pieces of bread into numerous toasters -- cords were everywhere. As we worked, we used TV cameras (in a studio) and they were recording and projecting the video as we worked. This looks very much like our chaos. Bravo! I like what you are doing. Reminds me of the spirit of dada and fluxus!
ReplyDeleteVery cool! toast piece sounds great. i wish our projector had been more bright, it would have been nice to project our faces on a larger space. and i was certainly thinking about dada when working on this but not copying because, as the old adage goes, out with the old because it's been done and it's boring (i can't speak for Noah, but i think he would agree)
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