MARCHALOOPS!

Inspired partly by a field trip to Seattle Experimental Animation Team (SEAT)'s great showing at Zeitgeist last week - thanks jumbo to Ruth and Peter for getting me out of this onecowtown! - I've set myself a challenge to put online one loop every day this month. Here's my main Vimeo page where you can see em all, and pick whatever floats your fancy - they're all about 1 minute or so:
http://vimeo.com/user4815979/videos

Or here's the first one to jump right in:




I've made it through the first week, so it's all lamb gravy from here on out. Although, words to the wise - beware the IDES!, and also Mercury going retrograde very soon - be careful out there: back everything up twice and often, and try not to do anything important for a few weeks.
Just under the wire before all that begins, I am delighted and terrified to report that I have officially joined the ranks of all y'all alien distracted nerds who stare down all the time making freaky movements with your fingers - I splurged my long-saved media improvement fund on an "iPod Touch"! Really I just bought it because I need something to play loud music in my head while I'm in the dentist chair, and I was most recently still using my Sony Walkman audio cassette player, and I figured, as long as I'm buying technology I may as well dive in already. Thanks much to longtime Oly media stalwart comrade Bridget Irish at the local mall Mac Store for making it possible - there's no way I could have survived the process without a friend on the inside, it's SCARY out there!! I've never had a cell phone, never sent nor received a text message, never even used any iPod thingamabob before - until this very morning I was an earbud virgin!! Never really had much urge for any of it frankly, still no interest in increasing any telephonic presence in my life, but this gizmo skips that part of the package, and now that I possess this cute new teeny weeny friend, I'm totally . . . what? . . . oh, sorry . . . oh-yeah, just a sec . . . yeah, totally, um . . . uh-huh, I'm listening . . . oh, um, I'm sorry, what? . . .

Agate Burnisher

While it is true what they say, that it's the singer and not the song, and tools don't make the man, or whatever it is they say . . . still, sometimes one stumbles upon a hitherto unknown implement that radically alters one's experience forever. Thus it was for me and my agate burnisher.

Evidently agate burnishers are made for doing gold leaf, and I got mine at mammoth Shipwreck Beads in deep industrial Lacey, WA (also mailorder), as a birthday treat to myself a few years ago. I do a lot of burnishing in my film, printmaking, and craft work, and I collect agates whenever I'm on the beach (like my Dad before me), so it was a natural match. But I never could have anticipated just how useful a tool it is - right up there with my lupe magnifier, razor blade/ exacto/ metal straight edge & cutting pad, and tweezers as essential tools used daily.



Burnishing in general is something that doesn't get emphasized enough in art classes besides some forms of printmaking, but I have found it is a critical step in going the extra distance to polish up work to greatness. Metaphorically speaking, it's good for your reputation too, give it a good rub in all the nooks and crannies! There's two places I'm most commonly burnishing: 1. in making sure stuff stuck on film is good and seriously permanently adhered, on every square millimeter. This ends up making a big difference down the line over time, both in the structural integrity of the film original - making sure it holds together, but also in getting everything stuck on there in as sharp focus as possible, by smoothing it down onto the same fine plane. 2. the other common technique I use often is the tape-lift technique, and here burnishing is critical to ensure that as much ink or toner as possible gets lifted off the paper, by sticking every bit of the tape down. In both these burnishings, I usually use several light sources at different angles (flourescent lights are especially handy when available), so that I can see the reflection as I'm burnishing, and this shows me fine details where I've covered with the burnisher and where I still need to rub more.

The coolest things about the agate burnisher are that it never wears down, and it never leaves any mark or residue, no matter how hard you press. Both plastic and metal burnishers can sometimes have these drawbacks. Plus there's just something that feels good about using a beautiful rock that came from the belly of the earth eons ago, to buff up your stuff to a brilliant sheen.

Turtlevision

The current issue of Beachcomber's Alert print newsletter features an incredible story about a digital camera in waterproof housing, lost by a diver in Aruba, found six months later in Key West. The super-amazing part of the story is that when the finder looked at the images on the camera, it ended with a movie of the camera floating in the middle of the ocean. After lots of consultation they figured out it had been intercepted by a loggerhead turtle who somehow triggered the record button and dragged it along for awhile. Turtlevision movie!! I think it's totally beauteous - definitely deserves a best director nomination.


For more wonders of flotsam and oceans science see also:

http://beachcombersalert.blogspot.com/2012/01/tsunami-debris-arrives-in-america.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BeachcombersAlert+%28Beachcombers+Alert%21%29

and a GREAT book!


http://flotsametrics.com/

and

http://beachcombersalert.org
and THANK YOU to Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer for all his excellent work and goodwill.

My Oh Maira

I may be a little slow to catch on, but eventually I get it that this is my own dang blog, hence need not be limited to any one subject, but rather may shamelessly include anything that strikes my fancy. Consequently, today I bring you the latest installment in my ongoing infatuation with all things Maira Kalman. No matter how many times I dip into the Maira well, I am never disappointed, but always emerge giggling and quenched by her endless fount of quirky delights.



My latest favorite is

http://lemonysnicket.com/vilevideos/
the video for the "13 Words" collaboration book is quite great too, and it plays automatically after the hat ice cream party ditty if you click Lemony's link.

However, if you are among the unfortunate thus far unfamiliar with Maira Kalman, the best place to start is with her incomparably magnificent blog for NYTimes a few years back, "And The Pursuit of Happiness."
http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/

The link takes you to the last of 12 monthly installments archived from 2009, but if you scroll to the bottom you'll see all of them. They take a bit to load, due to loads of yummy graphics and handwriting, and every one is well worth your while. In my humble estimation, this ranks among the top of the list of best uses of internet ever, and the long scrolling down reveals nearly endless wonders as your "page down" finger wanders. These were also published as a lovely book, though I still enjoy the original web blog format best.

Much much more to be found on her own site, every bit fantastic.
http://www.mairakalman.com/
for you bookish types, there's a plethora to choose from, and more all the time. My three most highly recommended currently are: "The Principles of Uncertainty" 2007
"Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World)" 2010
and
"Chicken Soup, Boots" 1993




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

Direct Laser Animation

This blogthang was supposed to be all about direct animation, handmade and
camera-free, but so far I've been mostly distracted by miraculous but immobile direct alchemical graphics and other animates. Fear not seekers! The direct animation revolution rides on full tilt ahead. Can't recall how I stumbled upon these beauteous kindred obsessives in our heartland, but they fill my heart with glee. They are cutting 16mm film with lasers and then taping it back together and doing multiple projector shows and magic. Where can I get my hands on one of them laser cutter thingies - quick!

http://www.reevesmachine.com/blog/16mmLaser.html



and as if that weren't enough, then there's the absolute coolest LOOPER ever at L'Abominable!!

http://www.reevesmachine.com/blog/16mmLooper.html

this is truly a loopalicious world after all . . .

Chimmi karma kitchie CHEMIGRAM-ee-o!

(Pierre Cordier as seen by Pierre Radisic -
- click link below for awesome chemi-disco-quicktime!)

Okay so now a day later and I am totally under the spell of Monsieur Cordier's Chemigrams, and then I find this!
http://www.exporevue.com/artistes/fr/radisic/chemigram.html
(I'm still learning about embedding video from untraditional sources - apologies - but that whole site from Pierre Radisic looks awfully cool . . . )

and then here's Pierre Cordier's crazy Chemigram Cinema! From 1962, with Marc Lobet, dig that synth sound too!



it's really worth a visit to his site too
http://www.pierrecordier.com/
what a great guy! and his artwork is amazing!!
Honestly I'm still trying to get a handle on exactly what a "Chemigram" is - I get that it's not using light at all, and that he uses crazy household stuff as the "localizing agent," but then it starts getting fuzzy. Maybe I'll understand better if I watch all three parts of the gallery talk they did around the time of the V&A Shadowcatchers exhibit last year.




Pierre Cordier, chemigram 29/11/76 Mineral vegetable animal, detail, 1976

Jeff Scher's Xmas Crumplemation and the Photogrammiverse

Talbot, 1839, cascade of spruce needles photogram


I love this piece to peaces!

http://vimeo.com/17654563
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a-JiNPcXjQ

Jeff Scher is genius! Seasonably dark and mystical, with lovely, subtle, glowing tints of wondrous tidings (I especially dig the pale greens with pale purples), whilst remembering we are still a people in wartime - hence insistent urgency to use our homespun heartstrings to craft a more rejoicing-worthy world.

Though it's not quite direct animation, and I suspect it's not even technically cameraless, he so successfully evokes both effect and spirit of direct photograms on film emulsion - the irrepressible soul of Man Ray and his Dada buddies early cinema experiments - that I don't care about production details, I just wanna see it again! Really nice to watch without sound too, though Paul's song ain't bad. So many lovely details, and among my favorite is the bit with crumpled currency, slowly uncrumpling in real time, closeup, in negative, seeing through both sides of the money at once.

What's really interesting to me about the success of this approach and technical considerations is that Scher is assumably utilizing various modern digital tricks and tools to create an illusion of anti-illusion. Cinema is an art medium with layers of illusions at its core - a sequence of still images creates an illusion of movement; stage sets, costumes, and actors reciting scripts create illusions of reality, etc. But early in cinema history, avant-garde artists subverted these illusions in various ways - including Man Ray's cinematic photograms - to call attention to the physical properties of film. So essentially here Scher is recreating that impulse to subvert the dominant paradigm by creating a wholly modern illusion which perfectly captures the hyper-reality of object photograms in motion. Bravo!

In related photogrammetry, I just discovered that the Victoria & Albert Museum in London has a series of videos online about the artists featured in last year's show "Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography." Great stuff! Here's delightful Pierre Cordier who taught me a new word for the day - Chemigram!

http://vimeo.com/13149446