Max Hattler:: Graphics-/-Animation Media Artist

a/v: '/\/\/\' (by Max Hattler + Noriko Okaku) from Max Hattler on Vimeo.

Fredrikstad Animation Festival-commissioned live animation performance feat. a soundtrack by Rich Keyworth. Premiered at Fredrikstad Animation Festival, Norway, 12 Nov 2009.

Aanaatt - Teaser (by Max Hattler) from Max Hattler on Vimeo.

"Max Hattler turns his talents for abstract animation to stop motion and comes up with this intriguing exercise in upside-down random geometry for Japanese electronica artist Jemapur thru W+K Tokyo Lab." FEED (Stash)

maxhattler.com

||post by Lorelei||

INSTALLATION: Chiho Aoshima: City Glow

Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles. © 2005 Chiho Aoshima/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.

Museum of Moving Images, Queens, NY

City Glow was made by Japanese artist Chiho Aoshima in collaboration with New Zealand-based animator Bruce Ferguson. Using a pictorial style derived from traditional and pop sources (Japanese scroll paintings, manga, and anime), City Glow contains a cyclical narrative, which begins with the dawn of a paradisaical garden. Living skyscrapers sprout during the day, only to be overgrown at night by a landscape filled with ghosts and fairies. Chiho Aoshima, born in 1974 in Tokyo, is a member of Takashi Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki Collective. (text via the Museum of Moving Images)

WEBSITE LINK

EXHIBITION
DATE: January 15-April 10
LOCATION:
35 Avenue at 37 Street
Astoria, NY 11106
718 777 6888
HOURS:
Tue-Thu: 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Fri: 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Sat-Sun: 10:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Mon: Closed

Visiting Artist: Brian Knep

The SMFA Film-Animation Area will be hosting Boston-based artist Brian Knep to present and discuss his work in the field of new media interactive installations. His work bridges the flow of science, biology and art, and is strongly attuned to the role of the human being as it's viewer and user. His subjects frequently fall into the category of microscopic living organisms, and his work is investigating their relationships to each other and the forces of change and struggle that are imposed upon them. Written into the code of these microorganisms' progress and change are most frequently the potential methods of healing. It is how these organisms deal with this struggle that most fascinates Knep, and marks a clear point of focus for the development of his works.

Brian frequently uses abstraction and most recently, cartooned drawings to render visible the presence of these imagined organisms. Animation is an essential aspect of the "life" that is expressed by these imaginary creatures and forms, even though it is animation derived from computer generated code.

Brian has had solo shows at the New Britain Museum of American Art, the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and Arizona State University and has been part of group shows at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Laval Virtual in France, MobileArt in Sweden, and the Insa Art Center in Korea, among others. His works have won awards from Ars Electronica, Americans for the Arts, AICA/New England and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 2005 Knep became the first artist-in-residence at Harvard Medical School in a program co-sponsored by Harvard's Office for the Arts. He lives and works in Boston and is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY and Judi Rotenberg Gallery, Boston.

• Visiting Artist: Brian Knep
• Time/Date: Thursday, Jan 27th, 12:30pm-2pm
• Location: Studio B113, Animation Studio, SMFA Main Bldg
• All SMFA related people are invited to attend.

Identity Element: Works from the New Axiom Group

THIS IS a local gallery exhibition of note for anyone interested in integrating animation into their work through inter-disciplinary means.

(the following taken from the axiom website)

Opening Reception: Friday, January 14th, 6-9 pm

Axiom celebrates recent organizational and structural shifts by kicking off 2011 with Identity Element: Works from the New Axiom Group. The first exhibition organized by the new Axiom group, it showcases Axiom’s new identity while maintaining its presence as an arts organization supporting innovative and experimental approaches to art-making.

Identity Element features the diversity of medium, process, and theoretical content present in the creative practices of the Axiom Group members. Derived from a mathematical concept, the title denotes a neutral part in the context of a group, playing with the idea that the identity, voice and vision of Axiom spring directly from the people involved.

The show features work by eleven artists in the new group and one outside artist curated by a group member. The artists’ backgrounds range from art history to traditional painting and sculpture to computer science. Building on their skills and interests, the artists work in animation, video, installation, design, sculpture, photography and hypermedia. Subject matter in the show ranges from conceptualization of the individual body in space to an exploration of free resources in the Boston area, from public access databases to collective unconscious memory.

GALLERY HOURS

During exhibitions
Wed 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Thurs 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Sat 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
and by appointment

LOCATION

AXIOM is located at the corner of Green and Armory Streets in Jamaica Plain, MA. The gallery is on the ground floor level of the Green Street train stop on the Orange line. 141 Green St. Jamaica Plain, MA 02130

Miwa Matreyek is another contemporary live performance artist that incorporates animation (projection) and multi-media, and has likely influenced Shana Moulton's movement into a specific style of live performance with her "Whispering Pines 10" mini-opera (see previous blog entry).

Myth and Infrastructure 4 minute excerpts from Miwa Matreyek on Vimeo.

Miwa does collaborative work as well as solo work, and seems to be dedicated to animation as the dominant environment in her mixed-media performances. She also has the surrealist approach in that she is blending fantasy and dream-like states into our viewer's real time world. Her use of her live body as a silhouette within the animation provides a narrative graphic function, engaging with the graphic animation, but her body doesn't necessarily stop there. Her physical, tangible form will enter into the work as well, and in some instances the work incorporates objects and forms. Matreyek goes between breaking/reforming the inferred "4th wall" between the viewer and the viewed.

Whispering Pines 10 Performance at New Museum

Whispering Pines 10 - Trailer from Shana Moulton on Vimeo.

Shana Moulton and Nick Hallett's epic multimedia one-act opera Whispering Pines 10 will run at the New Museum on Saturday and Sunday, January 8 and 9, 2011. Shana Moulton's Whispering Pines series focuses on the surreal existence of Cynthia, an agraphobic New Age-y hypochondriac, looking for magical ways to cure her imagined illnesses.

She incorporates lots of animation in these works, which is why I'm posting about it here. While this series began as a multimedia performance based entirely in video, it has now extended itself to live performance with multi-media animation, effects and musical score.

You can get tickets early through the New Museum site. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Tony Oursler exhibition

Tony Oursler
Peak
7 October - 4 December, 2010
201 Chrystie Street

Opening Reception
Thursday, 7 October, 6-8PM

Lehmann Maupin
201 Chrystie Street
New York, NY 10002
Telephone 212 254 0054
info@lehmannmaupin.com

Lehmann Maupin presents Peak, an exhibition of new works by Tony Oursler, on view at 201 Chrystie Street, 7 October – 4 December 2010. Peak continues the artist’s exploration into the ways in which technology affects the human psyche. Focusing on humankind’s obsessive relationship to computers and other virtual platforms, the works in this exhibition are microcosmic scenes that convey the varied nature of these relationships, such as obsession, escapism, isolation and sexual fetish. The installations reference dynamic systems and models, such as flowcharts, Rube Goldberg machines and astronomical orreries. Oursler’s projections combine glass, clay, steel and other raw materials with a synthesis of performance language and rhythmic editing.

Oursler explores Masahiro Mori’s “The Uncanny Valley”, which theorizes that as inanimate objects become closer in appearance to the human form and face, mankind will find them increasingly disturbing and therefore cast into the realm of the uncanny. Oursler redefines Mori’s theory by investigating our contemporary Internet usage, viewing the Internet as a mechanical reflection of our human psyche, inducing a compulsive relationship despite its disturbing effect. The dynamic developing between humans and the virtual apparatus becomes and is an epistemological mirror of the human consciousness and, thus, is uncanny in its nature.

LED Synch Strobe for Animation Device

Hooray! After a loooong time of trying to work out this challenge, I finally brought it all together. Here's a quick look at my set up for creating a synchronized LED strobe for my phenakistoscope wheel. The idea is to get an LED light to pulse on and off in relation to the sequence of animation frames. The wheel has slices along the perimeter which function as shutters when you use it to look at it in the mirror (normal way of observing a phenakistoscope). BUT! Now, you don't need the mirror, because the shutter system now becomes the on/off trigger, by opening and closing the visual connection between the infrared LED emitter and detector. Whoooohooo!!





brought to you by <.:: Lorelei ::.>

Gestural Interactivity with Wii and Flash

I've gathered together the information and methods for how to use the Wii remote, an infrared LED light and an interactive Flash "game" environment. The goal was to be able to take Johnny Lee's "wiimote whiteboard" and LED finger sensor system and to figure out an interactive animation method using Flash. An important part of this is that I use a Mac, and it took another cool inventor, Uwe Schmidt, uweschmidt.org, to execute the Mac version of Lee's Wiimote script.

The Wii remote can be used as an infrared receiver, receiving information of the infrared LED when waved in front of it. The Wii-remote is then passing coordinate information to the Mac's operation of the cursor. The Flash environment in this situation is a published SWF file, and is using an invisible "rollover state" button that is using action script (AS 3) to call 3 external movie clips to load/play until the next one is called.

I'm a novice when it comes to action script, so I hunted around for examples and modified those. This is ugly as a sample- it's only intended to demonstrate the concept. How about outfitting some gloves with IR LEDs, and using this system for gesture - interactive games!

IMPORTANT: the Wii whiteboard interface allows you to select a mouse "identity" that will either just MOVE the cursor on the screen, or use it to MOVE AND CLICK. It also can read MULTIPLE infrared LEDs, which allows you to get more complex with selecting and manipulating objects on the screen (see either Johnny Lee's demo or the "glovedgame demo", links below.)



SOURCE LINKS
johnnylee.net
uweschmidt.org
wiimoteproject.com/ir-pen info
Good youtube video on making IR LED pen
led.linear1.org
about resistors
GLOVED GAME demo using same system
youtube video showing game glove and Wii cursor in "move/click" mode
Wii TABLE using projector/mirror/frosted glass

from Lorelei

SMFA Animation Integration class

We had some fun and interesting assignments come out of a recent Animation Integration class. The goal of the course is to investigate "animation" as having other opportunities for invention, rather than being solely a cinematic, filmmaking-based medium and discipline. We investigate historical and contemporary developments, as well as ways to incorporate animation into other disciplines and practices.

Here are a few results from our first go around, as people are responding to early optical toys, and the idea of animation as something that we can engage with using our physical bodies. The "flipbook" was the base for many of these experiments.

Amelia's "Cat Ghost" experiment uses ideas of successively linked images, light, projection, and animation as object (the poster board,) body interaction and the paper strip coming from early optical toys, obviously leading to the film strip vertical orientation.



Andrew's sculptural penis-like flipbook flipper puppet uses body interaction, sculptural form and the flipbook as it's foundations.



Gaia's performance took on the idea of "flip" as she flips her sequential t-shirt drawings up and over. The reflexive imagery is doubled by her own body performing the action.




Rachel created a "private pocket flipbook," using the flipbook more literally, but challenging the context of how we use flipbooks in relation to our own body, as individual users and its relation to viewing animation socially / privately.




Ivette created a group interactive action using the flipbook as people. We all had one of a series of animation drawings paced onto our hands, layered our hands and then pulled them away, progressively revealing the litle creature falling away into space.








Christina experimented with the idea of the looping function found in toys such as the zoetrope and phenakistoscope.


Ryan explored possibility of engaging multiple flipbooks at once, having them combine to create a common image in randomized orders.

Motion Portraiture and Self-Portraiture: Cornell Cinema

Call for Submissions – Deadline: March 15, 2010

The Cornell Council for the Arts, Prudence Risley Residential College for the Creative and Performing Arts at Cornell University, and Cornell Cinema invite submissions of motion portraits and self-portraits for a curated screening.

Through this open call, we seek to uncover the full depth and range of contemporary portraiture and self-portraiture in time-based arts. Broad interpretations of “portrait” and “self-portrait” are welcome. Accepting all artworks which can be screened in video (including film, video, motion graphics, animation, programming, game interfaces, flip books, etc.) Due to scheduling limitations, works under 5 minutes preferred. Exhibition of the curated show will be at Cornell Cinema in April 2010.

Curated by Darren Douglas Floyd, Artist-In-Residence, Film and Video, Cornell University, 2009-2010 (web.mac.com/humiliated) with the assistance of Cornell University students.

Deadline: All entries must be postmarked by March 15th, 2010.
There is no entry fee.

Please send submissions as .mov data files on DVD to:
Open Call: Motion Portraiture and Self-Portraiture
c/o Darren Douglas Floyd, AIR
123 Risley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853-5801

Generous funding and support for this project is provided by The Cornell Council for the Arts, Prudence Risley Residential College for the Creative and Performing Arts at Cornell University, and Cornell Cinema.

cca.cornell.edu
www.risley.org
cinema.cornell.edu

For more information please direct queries to Darren Douglas Floyd, Artist-In-Residence in Film and Video, Cornell University, 2009-2010 at df278@cornell.edu.

The Wooster Group Visits Brown/RISD

Wooster Group Visits Brown/RISD

February 4, 7:30-9pm
Metcalf Auditorium at the Chase Center, RISD
20 N. Main St. Providence, RI
Free and Open to the Public

Influential multimedia theater troupe The Wooster Group visits Brown/RISD as part
of The Brown Multimedia and Electronic Music Experiments (MEME) department’s Visiting Artist Series, “Taking Stock: The Challenges and Opportunities of Interactive Technology in Performance and
Installation.”

Group members Kate Valk (performer and founding member), Scott Shepherd (performer), Andrew Schneider (video production) and Matt Schloss (audio production) will give a public presentation/panel discussion which will include a brief overview of their work mixing experimental theater and live mixed media production, as well as a panel discussion with audience Q+A.

Sponsored by the Watson Institute for International Studies, the Creative Arts Council, the Brown Music Dept., and the Rhode Island School of Design.

for more info, please visit: http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Music/sites/meme/events_vas.html

Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae

Athanasius Kircher was a 17th century German Jesuit scholar who is considered to be on par with Leonardo DaVinci in regards to his intensely driven scientific curiosity and discoveries. One of the many published books that came from his work is his Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (Great Arts of Light and Shadow) in the year 1645. The illustration above is a stunning example of his studies of light and optics using a designed room in which an observer could be entertained by the magical effects of controlled light rays, water, reflective planes and transmission of image. What make this concept all the more so fascinating is that Kircher includes a giant rolling drum in a container of water, clearly designed to reflect back pre-designed images painted upon the surface of each flat plane (most likely glass or shiny metal.) That drum pre-dates so many developments of the optical toy, such as the praxinoscope and zoetrope. The eye on the outside to the left of the room indicates a viewing hole for allowing a pinhole of light, indicating a camera obscura effect and projecting a landscape into the room.
(I don't read Latin, so the set-up is a bit confusing to me because the obscura is projecting the landscape on the ceiling, but the context of the illustrations and somewhat recognizable words leads me to this unofficial conclusion.)

The brilliance and curiosity of this scientist is made available online through digitized version of this truly amazing book of discoveries and analysis. You can easily view a copy online or download your very own version (takes about 1.5 hours for 1/2 GB.) The Bibliothèque Numérique du Cinéma has digitized and archived a stunning amount of very important and essential books that have all led to the development of what we know and understand as cinema today.

This page below is one the many examples in his book that demonstrates his particular examination of the pinhole as "lens" and the camera obscura phenomenon of light and image traveling in space. Consider the unusual concept of "image" and the fact that it can travel infinitely as light in order to appear magically on a flattened surface someplace else. The pinhole is the only device that contracts those rays of light and makes that image come into focus upon a plane that exists a measured distance away. So that would mean that the image, in fact what we think of as every distinct material and surface that comprises "image," exists simultaneously at all moments in every molecule of space as a "potential image." Does it not?

The last thing that just put me over the top when I was going through this amazing book of ideas, is that Kircher had this exciting and amazing SOLAR WATER heating system!! designed to drive water through a sculpture looking something like a Bacchanalian satyr. Wow, wow, wow.

posting by Lorelei P.

Stroboscope Animation Project

The SMFA Animation Integration class has been working on doing animation STROBOSCOPES. This is a collection of replacement animation sculptures/images that are mounted onto a fast, rotating turntable and flashed by a high-powered strobe light. This combination creates what appears to be animating sculpture.

The class worked on a small preparatory exercise, and then a larger group project. We held a mini-exhibition of the group stroboscope and our motorized thaumatropes. We had visitors, and they were excited and said that it all was very super cool and amazing.

You can check out our pictures online, and we'll be digitizing and posting some video of the animation soon (we hope!)

Watching You, Watching Me

Our Animation Integration class is making preparations for a public "Time-Lapse Performance/Installation" that will take place in the Atrium at the SMFA. We're going to be utilizing a collection of specifically selected (theme-based) webcams to project live feeds, and we'll execute a study of time by systematic tracing of incremental units of these projections over the course of time, as well as executing a practical study of the drawings themselves.

For the course resource, I'm posting an interesting way to access "private" security cameras using some interesting search parameters. A few of these camera systems are private, but most are public. What makes them available is that they are on the internet network. You'll see some malls, some offices, some labs, and you'll see them from around the world.

Use any of these search strings in Google to bring up a collection of security camera URLS.

inurl:/view.shtml
intitle:”Live View / - AXIS” | inurl:view/view.shtml^
inurl:ViewerFrame?Mode=
inurl:ViewerFrame?Mode=Refresh
inurl:axis-cgi/jpg
inurl:axis-cgi/mjpg (motion-JPEG)
inurl:view/indexFrame.shtml
inurl:view/index.shtml
inurl:view/view.shtml
liveapplet
intitle:”live view” intitle:axis
intitle:liveapplet
allintitle:”Network Camera NetworkCamera”
intitle:axis intitle:”video server”
intitle:liveapplet inurl:LvAppl
intitle:”EvoCam” inurl:”webcam.html”
intitle:”Live NetSnap Cam-Server feed”
intitle:”Live View / - AXIS”
intitle:”Live View / - AXIS 206M”
intitle:”Live View / - AXIS 206W”
intitle:”Live View / - AXIS 210″
inurl:indexFrame.shtml Axis
inurl:”MultiCameraFrame?Mode=Motion”
intitle:start inurl:cgistart
intitle:”WJ-NT104 Main Page”
intext:”MOBOTIX M1″ intext:”Open Menu”
intext:”MOBOTIX M10″ intext:”Open Menu”
intext:”MOBOTIX D10″ intext:”Open Menu”
intitle:snc-z20 inurl:home/
intitle:snc-cs3 inurl:home/
intitle:snc-rz30 inurl:home/
intitle:”sony network camera snc-p1″
intitle:”sony network camera snc-m1″
site:.viewnetcam.com -www.viewnetcam.com
intitle:”Toshiba Network Camera” user login
intitle:”netcam live image”
intitle:”i-Catcher Console - Web Monitor”

Here are some other random, but interesting webcams online:

live feed of the cargo crossing point, Gaza-Israel point

LochNess Cam

Giant Fish in a little Tank

Naked Mole Rat Cam

Microscopic Things Swimming Around Cam

Motorized Thaumatropes!

The SMFA Animation Integration class made motorized thaumatropes this week. A thaumatrope is an early Victorian era optical animation toy that was a paper disc with a different image on each side. Using string that was tied to either side of the paper disc, the user would spin the disc rapidly, causing the images to optically appear to blend into one image.

To make our thaumatropes we used 3v dc gear motors, batteries, wire, foam core, screws, washers, nuts and other stuff. Some people soldered, some people used breadboard circuitry, some people made special frames to hold the motors, and there was even a solar powered thaumatrope.

See pictures of the projects here!