Everything!

This is a show about "everything," and is just a bunch of short films made by various artists, some are funny, others are disturbing, and they're all pretty weird but I am fascinated with how short most of them are and how expertly the artists convey peculiar messages. A lot of them deal with human behavior and thought, which is also interesting to me. I have been making mostly music videos like we discussed yesterday in class, and shared a few of those influences, but I think these experimental films move in a direction I want to think about more, while still continuing to use music but not necessarily making it the focus or main factor of the works.

These are links to a few of my favorite episodes:

http://www.channel101.com/episode/801
http://www.channel101.com/episode/199
http://www.channel101.com/episode/764
http://www.channel101.com/episode/155

you won't be sorry you watched these!! trust me! 

Influences

here are some of the videos that have inspired my work, and some ideas I have been exploring with time manipulation and studying action, movement, intimacy, lost moments, nostalgia, relationships, and people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcqwfFKagH4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuoTjYYqe4c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHhox4_SeHQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKfD8d3XJok

Light Wave

This is especially for Patrick but everyone should check out Joe McKay's website who is in a show at ROCO in Rochester.

Gummy Bear Art

Hey everyone, although I have not gone yet for mid-term week. I have been working on a gummy bear affiliated piece. I have changed my ideas from day to day, the tape wasn't work out the way I was expecting.  I found this artist who made a chandelier out of cast acrylic gummy bears below is a link and some photos.  My work isn't quite at the point of taking a photo of it yet and it's 2D rather than sculptural.  Also my piece is made out of real gummy bears just another added touch, literally.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/12/chandelier-made-from-3000-gummy-bears-by-kevin-champeny/

NOVA documentary

Here's a link to the documentary i was talking about in my last post. It's an hour and fifteen mins but it's really interesting. Tons of different artists working mostly in new forms

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1ax7SD8wk4

Was just watching a documentary on Youtube about new young artists, lots of new formed materials being used. One artist I thought was interesting was Kit Webster; he uses projectors is a really interesting way.

http://vimeo.com/kitw

Saudade.

"Saudade is a Portuguese and Galician word that has no direct translation in English. It describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic or deeply melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves.

Saudade was once described as "the love that remains" after someone is gone. Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again. It can be described as an emptiness, like someone or something that should be there in a particular moment is missing, and the individual feels this absence. It brings sad and happy feelings all together, sadness for missing and happiness for having experienced the feeling."

...and that feeling/word is what inspired my work.

Along with this definition I'm making a video and I intend to do an installation.

I'm trying to show how it feels to be a foreigner, being far from home, the little things that make me miss my everyday life back in Brazil.

I'm trying to play with the 2D and 3D world, the 2D being the memories and the 3D the real life.

Some pictures of what I've been doing.

Controlling Lights 2

So continuing where I left off before, I've continued to add functionality to the device that I've been working on. I mentioned before I've been working with a friend of mine who's a grad CE student, and with his help I've made some pretty big strides. Here's a picture of the two sensors that I'm currently working with for this device.

This first one is the sound-based distance sensor, which has a reported range of 2mm to 500mm. It seems to work quite well at detecting distances, but was pretty tricky to get to that point because of a lot of false detection values it can put out which need to be sorted out. (In other words, it would give a few values saying nothing in the way there in the middle of a bunch of values saying something was in the way of it.)


The second one is a microphone sensor which detects sound. It's really pretty touchy, and doesn't work too well ad detecting quieter sounds like talking, but works well in detecting louder sounds like shouting or clapping. I can try fiddling with this more, but I think that it's really just because it's a cheap sensor.


At this point I have my setup controlling 40 LEDs, which I can control all of independently. I stopped at 40 independent LED's currently because that's the maximum for some hardware that I bought which let's me do that. They're called shift registers and look like this:


I can very easily scale up the number of independently controlled LED's though, by buying another pack of 5 of these guys. (1 shift register = 8 LED's controlled, so 5 shift registers = 40 LED's)

These are also independently controlled ones, so if I wanted several turning off or on at the same time, they could all be grouped and controlled together. So essentially at this point, I'm not entirely sure I need to be able to control more independently? I guess it would highly depend on what exactly I was doing with these, but I can scale up easily if I need to.

Getting down to the guts of things here though, currently I can have is so based on how close one gets to the distance sensor with that half a meter range I mentioned, I can drive LED's to do different things. I can also have them do different other things based on if they hear a sound through the sound sensor (currently it'd need to be a loud sound.) Adding something like switches for someone to interact with would also be trivial at this point as well. I can scale up anything that I'm doing also, besides the LED's. For instance, I can add up to ~9 more distance sensors if I wanted to with my current setup.

I thought about maybe adding some other sensors, like an accelerometer which would measure movement, or a light sensor which would measure light, but I think I don't really need to currently? If I have a specific idea that might use those I can explore those directions pretty easily at this point.

Really at this point I feel that I should move more into the direction of trying to figure out exactly what I want to do with all of this capability that I've developed here. I guess if you guys have actually read this far down in the post, you're probably decently interested in what I'm doing, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on what your thoughts are on how I could use these tools that I've been developing.

If you guys would like, I can also append some more pictures or videos of my current setup as an edit to this post, or a new post or something; whichever.

Thanks for reading!